The Historical Fertility Transition at the Micro Level: Why some are so early and some so late

Our aim is to explore socioeconomic fertility differentials in an industrializing community; to gain insight about the details and discuss possible mechanisms. The study starts well before industrialization and finishes at the end of the transition. We use longitudinal individual-level data from the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database, which contains demographic as well as socioeconomic information, including occupation, landholding and income. In the analysis we use hazard regressions with shared frailty at the family level. The transition involved not only parity-specific stopping but also spacing. While the upper social strata had higher fertility prior to the transition, they started to control their fertility earlier, by the 1880s, and also more consistently. Farmers, the middle class and skilled workers followed in the decades after, and unskilled workers with some additional delay. These findings are inconsistent with several of the major explanations in the literature, such as mortality decline, increased female labor force participation and a quantity-quality trade-off, but consistent with an innovation process where new ideas and attitudes about family limitation spread from the elite to other social groups.