When Wedding Bells Stop Ringing: An Economic Analysis of the U.S. Fertility Crisis

Abstract

Fertility in the U.S. has been in steady decline since the Great Recession. Surveyed opinions suggest this trend stems less from changing attitudes in ideal family size, and more from tangible barriers preventing people from having as many children as they desire. This paper explores several economic and social pressures that may have contributed to this discrepancy, with an emphasis on marriage. Marriage is considered to be the infrastructure that enables childbearing by minimizing both monetary and time costs. Using fixed effects and random forest regression, we estimate the impact of these measures and their relative importance on fertility decisions. We find that religiosity and female median wages are the two most influential predictors of TFR. These results imply that policies focusing on public assistance programs, or expanding IVF measures may not be appropriate to resolve the fertility crisis in comparison to tax restructures that incentivize marriage, and other initiatives promoting the increase of female wages