Gender empowerment as an enforcer of individuals' choice between education and fertility: Evidence from 19th century France.

• Individuals' choice between education and fertility can drive sustained growth. • Gender balance is important in depicting the real impact of quality-quantity trade-off. • A unique census-based French county level data is used for empirical analysis. • We find that higher education causes lower fertility and vice versa. • The effects of negative endowment almost disappear at a low level of fertility. • The results are robust to controls, endogeneity and distributional heterogeneity. Recent theoretical developments in growth models, triggered particularly by unified theories of growth, suggest that the child quantity-quality trade-off is a defining element in our explanation of a transition from Malthusian stagnation to a sustained growth path. This paper presents a model and derives a testable empirical framework to investigate the role of gender in the trade-off between education and fertility for 86 French counties during the 19th century. Endogeneity-mitigated mean- and median-based regressions offer robust empirical predictions for gender-empowered quantity-quality trade-off. In particular, we find the existence of a significant and negative association between education and fertility. Further, while gauging the differential effects of schooling on fertility, we find that the short-run differences between male and female are small whilst the long-run effects are large. From policy perspective, our results imply that for stable long-run growth it matters not just that parents educate their children, but specifically that they choose to educate girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]