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SOCIAL CAPITAL, HUMAN CAPITAL, AND FERTILITY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2019

Raffaella Coppier ,
Fabio Sabatini  and
Mauro Sodini
Raffaella Coppier
Affiliation:
University of Macerata
Fabio Sabatini*
Affiliation:
Sapienza University of Rome
Mauro Sodini
Affiliation:
University of Pisa
*
Address correspondence to: Fabio Sabatini, Sapienza University of Rome, Department of Economics and Law. Rome, Italy, and IZA, Bonn, Germany. e-mail: fabio.sabatini@uniroma1.it
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Abstract

We develop an overlapping generations model to study how the interplay between social and human capital affects fertility. In a framework where families face a trade-off between the quantity and quality of children, we incorporate the assumption that social capital plays a key role in the accumulation of human capital. We show how the erosion of social capital can trigger a chain of reactions leading households to base their childbearing decisions on quantity, instead of quality, resulting in higher fertility.

Keywords

FertilityQuantity–Quality Trade-OffHuman CapitalEducationSocial CapitalTrust
Type
Articles
Information
Macroeconomic Dynamics , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , April 2021 , pp. 632 - 650
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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Footnotes

We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions helped to substantially improve the paper. The paper also benefited from comments by participants at the 1st CICSE Workshop—10th Nonlinear Economic Dynamics (NED) Conference “Economic Dynamics, Economic Growth and Development”, Pisa, 7–9 September 2017. Usual caveats apply.

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