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Industrialization and Fertility in the Nineteenth Century: Evidence from South Carolina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2012

MARIANNE H. WANAMAKER
MARIANNE H. WANAMAKER*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, College of Business Administration, The University of Tennessee, 524 Stokely Management Center, Knoxville, TN 37996. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

Economists frequently hypothesize that industrialization contributed to the United States’ nineteenth-century fertility decline. I exploit the circumstances surrounding industrialization in South Carolina between 1881 and 1900 to show that the establishment of textile mills coincided with a 6–10 percent fertility reduction. Migrating households are responsible for most of the observed decline. Higher rates of textile employment and child mortality for migrants can explain part of the result, and I conjecture that an increase in child-raising costs induced by the separation of migrant households from their extended families may explain the remaining gap in migrant-native fertility.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 72 , Issue 1 , 12 March 2012 , pp. 168 - 196
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2012

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