Old-age security motives, labor markets, and farm family fertility in antebellum American

EXPLORATIONS

IN ECONOMIC

25, 164-197

HISTORY

(1988)

Old-Age Security Motives, Labor Markets, and Farm Family Fertility in Antebellum America WILLIAM A. SUNDSTROM AND PAUL A. DAVID Department

of Economics,

Stanford

University

The demand for children on the part of farm couples in antebellum America declined as labor market opportunities outside the agricultural sector improved. A connection between these two secular developments was forged by the operation of the old-age security motive for raising children. In exchange for their role in providing old-age security for their parents, the mature offspring of a farm couple expected to receive a portion of the farm family’s wealth, either as an inheritance or as an inter vivos transfer. The terms of this exchange are modeled as the outcome of an intergenerational bargaining process. The bargaining position and hence the allotted share of the young improved when they could point to greater opportunities for employment which they would forgo by remaining in the neighborhood of the parental farmstead. The value of children as old-age security assets consequently diminished. Under identifiable conditions, rational parents would respond by reducing their fertility. In multivariate regressions to explain the antebellum United States pattern of geographical variation in a fertility index (the rural white refined birth ratio), measures of nonagricultural labor market opportunities are found to have a large and significantly negative effect, as the foregoing theory predicts. The most widely cited alternative explanation for temporal and spatial variations in the fertility of the rural white population-the decreasing availability of cheap farmland with the progress of settlement-is shown to have little explanatory power when the labor market opportunity variables are included in the cross-section regression for state-wide averages in 1840. 0 1988 Academic

Press, Inc.

Where children play a significant part in the provision of support during the latter years of their parents’ lives, perceived changes in their value for that purpose could alter fertility behavior. Although this simple idea has been floating about for some time among economists (e.g., Leibenstein, 1957, pp. 159-170; Friedman, 1962, pp. 207-211; Neher, 1971), the question of its institutional relevance and empirical application to rural population history in the United States, curiously, has been neglected. Very possibly, there has been insufficient appreciation that the theory which unfolds 164

00144983/88 $3.00 Copyright All rights

0 1988 by Academic Press, Inc. of reproduction in any form reserved.

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from this kernel is considerably more general and rather more subtle than the specific propositions upon which much of the discussion by economists has focused, namely, those concerned with the demographic consequences of 20th-century social security legislation. The importance of children historically as providers of old-age security depended not only on the availability of alternative sources of income in old age but also on the reliability and quality of the support children could or would provide. In this essay we argue that the value of oldage support provided by children was determined within the larger context of the intergenerational exchange of parental wealth for old-age support between parents and their mature offspring. In this exchange the interests of nonaltrnistic parents and children were clearly at odds, creating the potential for intergenerational conflict-the existence of which has been repeatedly confirmed by research on the history of rural families in early America. Elsewhere we have depicted the terms of intergenerational exchange of parental wealth for old-age support as having been arrived at through a process of intrafamily bargaining, and we have modeiled the conflict resolution explicitly as the solution of an n-person cooperative game (David and Sundstrom, 1984). Here we build upon one of the results of that formal analysis, which suggests that the bargaining power of the young is enhanced, and their marginal value to nonaltruistic parents correspondingly is diminished, by the expansion of labor market opportunities beyond the environs of the parental farmstead. Because such opportunities can be measured, in principle and in practice, the implications of our theory can be subjected to empirical analysis and comparison with competing hypotheses. The present study features an initial, exploratory attempt to capitalize on this virtue and propose a new interpretation for the decline of farm family fertility in the antebellum United States. The salient facts of the fertility experience of the white rural American population between 1800 and 1860 emerge plainly from Table 1, which exhibits the spatial and temporal patterns in a measure known as the “refined birth ratio,” a variant of the child-woman ratio (CW). For present purposes, the refined birth ratio, expressing the number of children in the age range O-9 per woman in the age range 16-44, may be accepted as a reasonably reliable surrogate for direct period measures of fertiiity such as the total fertility rate or the gross reproduction rate.’ As may ’ This has continued to be the practice among contributors to the literature following Yasuba (1962); e.g., Steckel(l979). In support of it, cf. Bogue and Palmore (I964), Palmore (1972), Tucker (1974), for favorable assessments of the reliability of the child-woman ratio-conventionally defined as the number of children ages O-4 per woman in the age range 15-44, or 1%49-as a proxy for direct indices of fertility in national populations.

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SUNDSTROM

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TABLE 1 Rural White Refined Birth Ratio” in 1840 (CW40), and Its Level Relative to that for 1800 (CWOO) cw40

cw4o/cwoo

Northern states Maine New Hampshire Vermont Massachusetts Rhode Island Connecticut New York New Jersey Pennsylvania Ohio Indiana Illinois Michigan Wisconsin Iowa Missouri

1489 1164 1287 1071 1130 1047 1402 1427 1720 1818 2016 1944 1623 1517 1874 2350

0.74525 0.68390 0.62234 0.69591 0.72020 0.68791 0.70346 0.78321 0.87576 0.72720 1.00099 -

Southern states Delaware Maryland Virginia North Carolina South Carolina Georgia Florida Kentucky Tennessee Alabama Mississippi Arkansas Louisiana

1415 1416 1633 1667 1757 2109 1745 1936 2026 2224 2139 2259 1946

0.93771 0.85096 0.88750 0.86823 0.84107 0.97911 0.81653 0.83581 0.85253 -

-

-

u Birth ratio defined as C(O-9)/W(16-44) per thousand women. Source. Forster and Tucker (1972, pp. 40-41).

be seen from the table (col. l), the average level of CW for states within the country’s interior-both those in the Cotton South and the Midwestwere about double that prevailing in New England in 1840. It is the eastSundstrom and David (1985) report similar results obtained from a simple Monte Carlo study carried out using the U.S. state level CW data for 1840 (Appendix II), and also point out respects in which CW might be a more appropriate variable than the TFR or the GRR (Section 4).

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west gradient aspect of the pattern that has, without doubt, made the deepest impression upon those historical contemporaries and modem analysts who have argued that rising population density or diminishing land availability was the prime mover in the downward secular course of fertility (compare Tucker, 1843; Yasuba, 1962; Forster and Tucker, 1972; Easterlin, 1971, 1976). From the observable east-west movement of pioneering and agricultural settlement, made familiar by the work of Turner (1920) and his followers, it is an easy conceptual leap to remap the cross-sectional variations in fertility into the domain of time. Table 1 (col. 2) confirms that this projection is broadly consistent with the demographic experience of the early Republic. Between 1800 and 1840 fertility declined in every state, excepting Indiana, and perhaps also Georgia. Substantial down-trends were recorded in most states, and were not peculiar to the Northeast. The most influential modern theoretical account for the purported link between land availability and fertility is Easterlin’s (1976) “target bequest” hypothesis. According to this view, the typical American farmer was strongly motivated to establish his offspring with a start in life “at least as good as that which his father gave to him” (1976, p. 65). Rural settlement, operating through reduced returns to farming or escalating land prices, allegedly made this goal increasingly costly to achieve; hence fewer children could be adequately endowed. Easterlin and his students have sought to account in these terms for the geographic pattern of differentials in the fertility of northern farm couples before 1860(Easter&r, 1976; Easterlin et al., 1978; Schapiro, 1982). As it turns out, we find that the cross-section pattern is better explained by a different hypothesis, namely, that the availability and relative attractiveness of opportunities for young adults outside the agricultural sector depressed parents’ demand for children as old-age security assets. The argument and evidence marshalled here emphasize the importance of reexamining the U.S. demographic experience during the early 19th century within the larger context created by the processes of commercial and industrial transformation that were underway in varying degrees in different regions of the country. Rather than interpreting the decline of rural fertility as a homeostatic adjustment induced by increasing rural population density, we argue that even within the rural sector itself declines were strongly linked to the irreversible process of labor-market development in manufacturing and other sectors of the economy. Our theoretical approach is motivated and explained in Part 1, where the argument is developed in three steps. First, we establish the premise that the children of American farmers historically played an important role in the arrangements made for the maintenance and care of their elderly parents, and that considerations of their usefulness in fulfilling those needs could, under some conditions, furnish rational motives for

168

SUNDSTROM

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DAVID

high fertility goals. Second, we suggest why farming couples’ perceptions of the value of rearing additional children would be affected not only by the existence of alternative means of transferring income between phases of the life cycle, but also by the development of attractive earnings opportunities that would tempt young adults to remove themselves from the environs of the parental homestead. A theory of intrafamily bargaining (David and Sundstrom, 1984) helps us to draw an explicit connection between such developments and the diminution of children’s value to their parents as “old-age pension assets.” Finally, we present a simple, two-period model of intertemporal resource allocation, which conveniently summarizes the effects upon desired family size of changes in the oldage asset value assigned to children. The essay’s Part 2 searches for quantitative evidence to substantiate the presence of the linkages we hypothesize. Where better to begin than with a reexamination of the same body of aggregative measures of rural fertility that supported the classic studies by Yasuba (1962) and Forster and Tucker (1972), and still more recent proponents of the population pressure-land availability explanation? The imperfections of the data, and the high level of aggregation at which our exploratory regression analysis has been pursued, admittedly, are drawbacks that make the exercise of due caution here as necessary as in previous studies. But we cannot help being impressed and encouraged by the finding that, in “explaining” the state-level geographical pattern of fertility in the white rural population in 1840, indices of the prospective development of nonagricultural labor market opportunities are found to be more powerful predictors than the land availability measure selected for the latest study to “confirm” Easterlin’s target bequest model (Schapiro, 1982). The empirical exercise also permits a brief examination of the potential for using our model to explain the problematic North-South regional differential in rural white fertility, a matter on which proponents of the target bequest hypothesis have remained silent. 1. OLD-AGE SECURITY, FERTILITY GOALS, AND MARKET DEVELOPMENT EFFECTS Old Age and Offspring

in Rural America

It should not require a great deal of argumentation to establish that from colonial times through to the eve of the Civil War, and beyond, American farmers looked to their children as future providers of support, or at least as insurers of such material needs and comforts as they might require during their old age. Nugent (1985) has laid out some of the key conditions in which old-age security concerns are likely to emerge as an important motive for bearing and rearing many children; namely, those circumstances in which the relevant parent is uncertain about his or her

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ability to be self-supporting in old age and dubious that there are other reliable or more effective means of such support than his or her own offspring. Perhaps most obvious among these is the expectation that “‘old age,” the perceived phase of potential dependence, will occupy some appreciable portion of the life cycle. In many poor agrarian societies, even among young adults, life expectancies remain so low as to raise serious doubts a priori about the relevance of the old-age security hypothesis. But the case of early America’s rural population virtually defines the opposite extreme. As recent historical researches on old age and mortality have indicated in the Northern colonies throughout the 18th century, and by the early 19th century more generally, the life expectancies of those who survived childhood were impressively high (cf. Fischer, 1977; Fogel, 1985). On the basis of the age-specific rates of mortality prevailing in the U.S. white population as a whole from 1800 through 1835, for example, a male at age 20 could expect to survive until about the middle of his 64th year (Kunze, 1979, p. 113). From the economist’s perspective, however, it is not so interesting to calculate the chances of surviving to, and beyond, any particular point in the life cycle which we today would deem to mark the onset of “old age.” What is more important in the present context is the likelihood of surviving into a perceived phase of adult dependency, for which provision would have to be made of an income source besides one’s own labor. Among men, the age of 60 does seem to have been regarded by colonial New Engilanders as some kind of a “border,” beyond which “infirmity,” “deformity, ” “weakness,” and “natural decays” were expected to cumulate rapidly (Demos, 197.5/1983,pp. 270-273,280-283). Althaugh militias and paramilitary organizations may have excused males above 60 from the presumption of being subject to “training,” farmers seem to have remained active in production and community affairs as long as they were physically able. If they did not act@ly “retire,” there is nevertheless fragmentary and indirect evidence suggesting a systematic tendency for the level of their activities to decrease (Demos, 1975/1983, pp. 290-293). Actual managementof the family farmstead often was explicitly reequipped to a son-even if title was not-when the father regched midsixties (Fischer, 1977, p” 54). Whether or not farmers actually found their labor power restricted by the growing infirmities of age, perceptions of a waning of productive vitality duriqg the sixth decade of life would constitute a rational motive for life-cycle savings on the part of anyohe who expected to survive beyond that stage. It would be preferable to increase leisure once its opportunity cost had begun to decline, and hence it would be optimal to fina.pee the maintenance of nonleisure consumption by drawing down previously accumulated assets. In Table 2, the measure Rg indicates that during thk 18th and first half of the 19th centuries white males entering

23.2 23.8 23.4

Plymouth colony Women born 1650-1700

Hingham, Massachuset+ts Marriage cohorts of 1701-1720 1741-1760 1801-1820

1766-1795

1746-1775

22.5 22.4

Atlantic seaboard colonies, white women Birth cohorts of 1731-1760 22.3

21.8

Place, people, and date

22 22 22

23 24 23

22

Estimated age of new brides (mean x)

30.2 29.5 28.7

26.7 31.7 29.0

29.7

ef40 (1)

Life table

29.1 29.3 29.7

29.9 31.2 29.0

31.2

(2:

em

TABLE 2 Prospects of Growing Old in America: Risks and Expectations

0.583 0.561 0.529

0.549 0.584 0.553

0.524

Pb (3)

b

19.2 18.6 18.5

18.9

17.1 17.8

17.4

e, (4)

11.3 10.6 9.9

16.3

14.2 14.3 14.7

14.0

14.9

7.8

16.2

(61

p

10.5 10.5

9.2

(3

wb

Computed from model tables

Facing Brides and Grooms

% c B

%

$

2 3 2 g

z 0

22.4 22.5 22.6 22.4 22.6

22 22 23 22 23 28.5 28.3 27.8 28.3 27.9

28.9 27.9 28.0 29.0 28.5

0.542 0.560 0.543 0.534 0.534

18.8 19.7 19.2 18.8 18.9

10.3 11.1 10.5 9.8 10.2

13.9 12.9 13.1 13.8 13.6

Nofe. Dates refer to the actual or approximate cohort for whom e,,s were obtained. Average ages of brides used for purposes of computation, are shown as x, for each cohort. Variables are defined as efdO,female’s expectation of life at age 40, from historical life table; emAo,male’s expectation of life at age 40, from historical life table; Pb, estimate of average new bride’s probability of widowhood, i.e., that she will outlive her spouse; eWb,estimate of average new bride’s expectation of life as a widow, i.e., the expectation of life conditional on outliving her husband, assuming no remarriage; wb, estimate of average new bride’s expected number of years in widowhood, i.e., certainty-equivalent duration of life after death of husband, assuming no remarriage; RE, estimate of average groom’s expectation of life beyond age 55, conditional on marrying a new bride of average age. Sources. Historical sources for the entries in ~01s. 1, 2 and associated estimates of mean ages of women at (first) marriage, x, are described by Sundstrom and David (1985, Appendix II), along with computational procedures used to obtain estimates in ~01s. 4-6 from model life table function values corresponding to em’s, indicated brides’ ages, and corresponding estimates of the mean interspousal age differences. Barbara Vaughn, of OPR, Princeton University, kindly supplied the mathine-readable version of the Coale-Demeny Regional Model Life Tub/es (2nd Ed., 1983) used in constructing the estimates in ~01s. (3)-(6) of this table, and Andrew Levin provided able assistance in programming and executing the necessary computations based on formulas derived from Goldman and Lord (1983). This material is available from the authors on request.

United States, white women Birth cohorts of 1776-1805 1786-1815 1796-1825 1806-1835 1816-1845

3 f3 P q e

2 g 2

k

’ 5

172

SUNDSTROM

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a first marriage typically could have expected to survive from 13 to 15 years beyond the age of 55. There is reason to believe that the longevity of those living in rural settlements may have been somewhat greater, although the main differences in rural-urban mortality rates in this era affected the life expectancies of infants and children, rather than those of young adults (Kunze, 1979; Fogel, 1985). For the wives of farmers, the risk felt most keenly must have been that of widowhood. When a man died in the New England colonies, his wife was placed in an economic position of some doubt and perhaps even jeopardy. Few women with young children would be able to sustain themselves through entering trade or market work, and the opportunities for remarriage declined precipitously with age at widowhood, reaching negligibly low levels for women in their forties (cf. Demos, 1975/1983, pp. 287-289; 303; Keyssar, 1974). Beyond the measure of security afforded by the common law principle of “widow’s thirds,” which entitled a widow to the use of one-third of her late husband’s lands during her lifetime, there is an abundance of documentary evidence in wills and deeds that attests to recognition of a need for extended support on the part of elderly widows (cf., e.g., Main, 1985, and references therein). A bride’s prospects of life in widowhood, putting aside the possibility of remarriage, would depend upon her own chances of dying (and the risks attending childbirth were considerable), as well as those of her husband; the likelihood of her being widowed, therefore, was affected by her age at marriage and the age of her groom (Goldman and Lord, 1983). These factors have been taken into account in preparing the illustrative estimates, presented in Table 2, showing levels of life expectancies and the risks of widowhood among white women in America during the 18th and early 19th centuries. A woman who reached her 40th birthday could expect to survive into her late 60s (Table 2, col. l), possibly until her 70th birthday if she had a spouse to grow old by her side. Reckoning the odds at the time she first married, around age 22-23, however, it was a more than even bet (col. 3) that she would outlive her groom. In the absence of remarriage, a bride who outlived her husband could expect her life as a widow to extend for fully 19 years (col. 4). Therefore, the average new bride’s unconditional expectation of life in widowhood lay in the range of lo11 years (col. 5), a substantial span of time over which an income stream would need to be provided. Consideration of the variability of this period, like that of the variability of the anticipated male life span beyond age 55, could only have further intensified concerns for old-age security. The old-age security motive for childrearing is obviously strongest where more attractive assets-in terms of liquidity, riskiness, and yieldare not available, and purchaseable retirement services for farm couples are lacking. Research into early American rural capital markets is still

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rather inconclusive on this point. Rothenberg’s (1985) recent findings for Middlesex County, Massachusetts, however, do indicate that until late in the 18th century it was only the most prosperous farmers who were extensively engaged in regular lending activities. These were reflected in the substitution of financial assets for tangible physical wealth in the estates of decedents. For present purposes, we may simply note that the principal asset of most farmers consisted of the land and buildings of the farm itself. Farm property was rather illiquid except where land markets were highly developed, and even there it was fully divisible only at substantial costs; moreover, it remained strongly complementary wit the labor services of grown children.’ The most direct evidence of the role children played in furnishing oldage security comes from written agreements describing the terms of such support, found in the records of intergenerational property transactions.’ As we noted above, the transfer of land or wealth to the younger generation often came with the written quid pro quo that the children support their parents in their old age or retirement-and most often specifically their mother, should she be widowed. Written provisions were especially prevalent in colonial New England and some’ ethnic immigrant communities of the Midwest during the 1800s. It seems reasonable to suppose that less formal arrangements were made elsewhere. Bequests in the form of written wills were only one of several means by which l&h- and P&h-century American farmers transferred land to their children. Friedberger’s (1983) extensive study, based upon probate dockets and deeds in seven Corn Belt townships over the period 18701950, found that only 46% of the cases of documented land transfers involved testate estates, in which the terms of the transfer were specified in a will; in 26% of the cases the mechanism was intestacy, whereby ’ In 1774 the value of land represented 51.3% of private wealth including slaves and servants among farmers and planters in the 13 colonies, but 74% of the same wealth category in the New England colonies alone. Land represented 68.3% of private physical wealth excluding slaves and servants for all wealth holders in the 13 colonies. Farmers and nonfarmers held quite similar proportions of their wealth in the form of land, in each of the regions of the colonies (Jones 1980, pp. 97, 103, 227). A centnry later, in 1870 when slaves no longer figured in agrarian wealth-holding, white farmers held 726% of their total estates in the form of real estate (Soltow, 197.5, pp. 76-77). Perhaps more to the immediate point, the relative position of financial assets (loans, securities, and cask) in farmers’ portfolios remained very circumscribed well into the antebellum era. In Middlesex County, Massachusetts, during 1783-1838, for example., financial assets made up from one-sixth to one&h of total wealth, on average, among. the estates of decedents who occupied the interquartile range of the wealth distribution in a sample 80% of whom were farmers (Rotkenberg, 1985, Table 4). 3 We are in the process of gathering a large body of suck evidence from many historical sources, not only those relating to American farm families. We would welcome cornmu nications from readers who have encountered records of this kind in the course of their own research.

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terms were settled in accordance with probate law; the remaining 28% consisted of inter vivos transfers. The most elaborate old-age support arrangements are in fact documented in the deeds drawn up for inter vivos transfers of farm land and buildings.4 Such agrarian “maintenance agreements” have a long history in the West, and can be dated back at least to medieval England; analogous arrangements are recorded among the marriage agreements drawn up by well-to-do farmers in the Be-de-France beginning in the 17th century.’ In the American setting, it appears that three basic forms of inter vivos transfers were used by farming families. First, title to the parental land might be transferred as an outright gift to the children. The quid pro quo expected of the recipients could range from provision of firewood (Auwers, 1978, p. 136; Demos, 1975/1983, p. 238) to contributing onehalf of the farm’s product to the parents-thereby instituting an intergenerational sharecropping arrangement (Greven, 1970, p. 145; Salamon, 1980, p. 303). In colonial New England, as in some farming communities in the Corn Belt during the present century, a child (often the youngest) who was deeded the parental household was charged with caring for the elderly parents, especially a widow or widower, in a fashion that was quite strictly prescribed (Demos, 1970, pp. 99, 177-78; Demos, 1975/1983, p. 287; Smith, 1978, p. 296; Friedberger, 1983, p. 9). The second and third forms of transfer inserted the cash nexus into the pattern of reciprocal exchange among family members: the rental of farmland to the children during the parents’ lifetime, with provision for inheritance upon their death (Rogers, 1983), and the formal sale of property to children (Greven, 1970, pp. 136-137; Conzen, 1983). Among the German immigrant communities in Minnesota during the late 19th century, it has been found that fathers often sold land to their sons at prices considerably 4 Demos (1970, pp. 76-77) writes of evidence from Plymouth Colony that “some men made arrangements of this kind even before their death-‘retiring,’ in effect, on the ‘social security’ provided by a willing child.” In the absence of customary provisions for “retirement” which were strongly enforced by community sanctions, and when parents were unwilling or unable to make children wait until the unexhausted balance of their wealth was conveyed by means of bequests, one would naturally expect inter vivos transactions to reveal most starkly the nature of the intergenerational exchanges through which old-age support was arranged. The parties granting title to any substantial portion of their property in anticipation of income or services in kind (not to mention respect and affection) would have a clear incentive to protect themselves against a breach of contract by legally documenting a minimum set of conditions which the grantees would be expected to fulfill as their part of the bargain. 5 For England, see Homans (1941, pp. 144-159) and Howell (1983, Chap. 10). We are grateful to G. Postel-Vinay for bringing to our notice the unpublished work of Moriceau (1985) on the elderly farmers of the Ile-de-France. These individually negotiated agreements for old-age support are to be distinguished from the more institutionalized central European arrangements for “peasant retirement,” described by Mitterauer and Sieder (1977/1982, pp. 162-167), and by Held (1982).

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below the market value; they also provided equipment and livestock as part of the deal, at nominal charges (Conzen, 1983, p. 31). The fact that the parents did not sell or mortgage their farms to a third party at the going market prices suggests that they may have valued keeping the property in family hands-and correspondingly were willing to forgo some additional retirement income. Consider the following deed from Iowa in 1887, which records the conditions for the sale of a family farm by an aging widow to her son: The grantor saves, reserves, and excepts to herself the right to use two rooms in the lower floor of the main part of the brick house on the above described premises. Also stable room and pasturage for two cows, all of which grantor is to have for and during the term of her natural life. Grantor also reserves necessary timber for her firewood for her own use for the same period; some to be cut and delivered by grantee at the house, and is to have free ingress and exgress to enjoy above reservations. The grantee . . . agrees to provide for grantor food and home suitable to her condition and situation. . . . (quoted in Friedberger, 1983, p. 9)

Obviously, the true cost of the farm to this son exceeded whatever cash price he paid for it, although that price may have been below the market value. How many children were needed to satisfy a couple’s old-age security requirements? The answer is important, because changes in the old-age support function of children could not account for rural fertility patterns if the motive demanded only one or two children in the first placee6 Unfortunately, there is no ready answer given the present state of research A few points, however, may suffice to convince the reader that demand for children for old-age security could have been considerably greater than one or two. First, the fact that some of the written retirement agreements singled out one son to house and feed the parents does not exclude various possible side payments and services provided by the son’s siblings residing in the area. Second, old-age support could be more amply and safely provided if its burden were divided among as many children as possible Indeed, for families farming near the aspiration level of consumption prevailing in their community, and a fortiori for those close to the subsistence margin, support of the old could conceivably have required the surpluses of several farms. This is true especially because the burden of aging parents imposed on a farm couple was likely to fall at a time when the couple were raising their own children, several of whom would 6 See Bernheim (1984) on the argument that parents need at least two offspring to exercise the “manipulative bequest motive,” playing off one potential beneficiary against another (credible) contender in order to extract more “child services” than even altruistic offspring would otherwise supply.

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be too young to contribute to production.7 Third, the risk of child attrition through mortality or abandonment could be reduced via “safety in numbers. ” Finally, as we stressed on earlier occasions, in a free -society it is a potentially misleading metaphor to describe one’s own children as “assets.” For, unlike negotiable assets, they cannot simply be traded with vendors of the goods and services one desires to have. We cannot negotiate children to realize their economic value; we are obliged, in one way or another, to negotiate with them. Rational parents thus might have recognized that rearing a large surviving brood of children would strengthen their future bargaining position vis-a-vis any one of their offspring when it came to negotiating the terms on which property would be “exchanged” for old-age care (David and Sundstrom, 1984). In this regard, sibling rivalries may acquire a functionality from the parental vantage point, which has been noticed also by Ryder (1983, p. 28). Beyond anything that risk aversion might dictate, there consequently would be a rational motivation to create substantial “redundancy” in the set of surviving offspring upon whom aging parents could draw for support. In other words, quite apart from whatever direct value might be conferred upon the agrarian household by the presence of a large brood of children, a consideration stressed recently in Caldwell’s (1982) theory of fertility decline, the head(s) of such households could also derive greater bargaining power in the disposition of the household’s resources by virtue of being able to claim the allegiance of more offspring than would actually suffice to fulfill their old-age security needs. These “bargaining” considerations make it all the more dubious to attempt to infer, from consideration of the physically necessary number of offspring alone, the size of the brood that would be considered as justified on the basis of the old-age security motives. The Effects of Nonfarm

Labor Market

Opportunities

As the United States was settled, agricultural labor markets developed and employment opportunities outside agriculture proliferated. The latter were especially associated with the emergence of centers of commercial industrial activity that first became noticeable in the Northeast, but spread throughout the country in the course of the 19th century. The potential effects of these labor market developments upon fertility behavior are numerous. Osterud and Fulton (1976), for example, argue that the fertility ’ Consider a typical farm couple, whose parents were about 25 or 30 years old when they were born. The couple would begin bearing children near the age of 25; within 5 or 10 years their surviving parents might begin requiring some old-age support. In the average 1860 farm household with a wife in her 3Os, the number of dependents (persons under 15 or over 64) exceeded the number ages 16-64 by about 30% (Easterlin et al. 1978, p. 30). See also Fischer (1977, p. 228) for a typical demographic life cycle.

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decline in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, prior to 1850 was attributable in large part to the transformation of rural mentalitks induced by commercialization. Participation in labor markets, they suggest,was especially influential in this regard: “Labour became separated from personal character and from interpersonal relations, and became subject to calculation of value and conscious allocation” (Osterud and Fulton, 1976, p. 494). Presumably once parents started making the calculation, the desired fertility they calculated fell below preexisting fertility norms or “natural fertility,” and a decline set in. Although such a shift in attitudes is plausible and worthy of further attention, for the present we shall continue to proceed under the assumption that farm couples always had made roughly rational calculations of the value of their children both aslaborers and as sources of old-age security. Our interest naturally focuses then upon the causes and effects of changes in the value of children in their old-age security function. Labor market development affected the generations asymmetrically, The older generation, settled on their homesteads, were unlikely to take advantage of new income-earning opportunities. For the young, on the other hand, economic independence and opportunity came Eessand less to hinge on an endowment of wealth or land from their parents. “Land is the whip,” remarked a farmer interviewed by Salamon (1980, p. 3041, but that whip must have lost some of its sting when the young could avail themselves of other options. The repercussions of their chi1dre~9s widening opportunities were potentially adverse for an older generation unprepared to counteract the pull of such attractions. First, labor market opportunities competed for and eroded the loyalty of children to their parents (Ryder, 1983, p. 28; Nugent, 1985, p. 79). The customary rules of the game, whereby the younger generation labore for and supported their elders in return for the right to succeed them i the next stage of the life cycle, were called into question.’ A second an related point is that nonagricultural opportunities increased the likelihoo that some children might simply leave the farm community to pursue their fortune in a distant labor market. In the absence of remittances, or of adjustments of the amounts bequeathed to those who left, or of their agreement to undertake the burdens of rearing their minor siblings, their contributions to the parents’ old-age support would be lost. The problem of elderly farm couples “abandoned” by their children is a familiar one in late-19th- and 20th-century U.S. rural social history, but its emergence in the older agricultural communities of the Northeast during the antebellum era has perhaps been insufficiently appreciated. * In colonial New England farming communities, the iacreasirsg economic independence of the young-a result of growing opportunities in the trades and other ag:Cicultural communities-led to a noticeable decline in the patriarchal power of elder farmers to command the labor of grown sons (Greven, 1970; Folbre, 1985).

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Folbre (1985, p. 219) rightly draws attention to it, citing the Reverend M. A. Stone’s remarks to the Agricultural Society of Massachusetts in 1846: “There is a frequent complaint among farmers that their sons early manifest a distaste for agriculture; that as soon as they are of an age to be useful, they seek other employments, and leave them to manage the homestead under the disadvantage of hired assistance.”

Such circumstances are to be distinguished from the case of children who entered the local agricultural labor market, and so remained available in the neighborhood to assist their parents with the work of the homestead. The issue of abandonment or “child default,” as Williamson (1986) has recently phrased it, is a complicated one, however. In some cases the outmigration of young adults might indeed indicate genuine abandonment, which we would construe to be “noncooperative” withdrawal of resources from the family’s control. Such action, from the parents’ point of view, would have economic implications identical to the exogenous demise of the child. The economist then could treat higher rates of “child default” the same as higher child mortality rates, from which would follow the implication that greater risks of (exogenous) default might just as readily raise as lower the desired level of fertility.’ But abandonment is by no means homologous with the outmigration of young adults: in many cases outmigration of some children might have been part of a cooperative family strategy. Certainly the evidence of remittances from young migrants to their families in some cultures suggests that the concept of child default is inadequate as a general theory of the impact of migration on old-age security motives for child raising. We maintain that the distinction between cooperative and noncooperative behavior of family members is most crucial, and that the terms “child default” and “abandonment,” rather than being used casually, ought to be reserved in economic discussions for application to the noncooperative cases: children leaving without having formed a binding commitment to remit, receive parental assistance, and/or return to provide old-age support at a later time. Thus understood, the relevance of child default in the antebellum American context remains to be demonstrated. Certainly the growing allure of off-farm opportunities placed stress on existing cooperative arrangements between the generations; but we believe there is little evidence that the prevailing European cultural norms and rules governing relationships within lineages were not generally robust enough to withstand these strains, at least for a time. 9 Williamson (1986) maintains that default risk, in effect, made child assets less attractive as a form of savings. But highly risk averse couples with no superior alternatives could be led to buy “safety in numbers” and bear more children in order to keep some at home.

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Finally, within those families that stayed together in the original community and continued to operate under the customary rules of the game, the allocation between generations could change. This is the spirit of our earlier work, which models the terms of the intergenerational exchange as the cooperative solution to an n-person bargaining game (David and Sundstrom, 1984, esp. Chap. 4). From this perspective, customary rules do not dictate the exact terms of exchange. Instead, they constitute mutually acceptedprocedures and norms of fairness governing the allocation of family resources (wealth) among the parents and children. Which particular allocation is accepted as fair can vary with circumstances. As the outside opportunities of younger family members improved, staying in the community and assisting their parents would entail an increasing personal sacrifice. In the context of the implicit or explicit bargaining process we hypothesize, the young are able to cite this sac&ice in justifying their claims for compensation in the form of reduced responsibilities for parental support and/or an improved endowment. In either case, the distribution of the family’s wealth would shift in favor of the young.‘O A couple who observed this shift, perhaps in their own or in comparable, neighboring families, would anticipate a falling per-child return on their “investment” in children as a source of old-age security/support. Labor Market Opportunities and the Demand for Children: A Model

The preceeding considerations lead us to the proposition that expanding labor market opportunities for young adults inside and outside the local agricultural sector tended to reduce the expected value of additional children as old-age security assets.” The effect of this reduction on a couple’s desired family size can be analyzed using a simple two-period model of intertemboral consumption choices, with children as the principal “asset.” A model of this kind was analyzed by Neher (1971) for the case of a primitive economy in which the social product is divided among all members of society according to a “share alike ethic.” Our model replaces this distributional rule with an intergenerational bargaining process, but in broad outline the models are otherwise quite similar. Figure 1 shows the relationships that underlie the frontier of feasible consumption combinations facing a young farm couple. Quadrant I contains the intertemporal frontier itself-the tradeoff between a farm couple’s consumption in period 1 (c,), when they are young adults raising N1 young ” The model developed in our 1984 essay distinguishes two labor market effects, both of which alter the intergenerational bargain. The first is the introduction of rural labor markets in a formerly autarkic agrarian setting. The second is the improving relative wage of labor outside the farm locale. *’ This analytical result is sensitive to our assumptions that children who entered the market and left the family farm would tend not to make substantial remittances to their parents.

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SUNDSTROM

child

AND DAVID

survival

t N

FIG. 1. Determination

1

of the parents’ intertemporal

opportunity

set.

children, and in period 2 (cJ, when they receive old-age support from their N2 mature offspring. The frontier is described by a function, c2 = 4fcJ. Wealth can be transferred from period 1 to period 2 through the medium of child assets. The frontier $ of the intertemporal opportunity set in Quadrant I is derived as follows: Suppose that the couple’s initial wealth, including the stream of farm production, permits them maximum first-period consumption of max c 1. Rearing young children is assumed to be a net cost; hence in quadrant II the number of young children reared is associated with reduced cl along the budget constraint, or cost function. In the diagram we have assumed constant marginal childrearing costs so that the budget constraint in period 1 is linear. N1 is bounded above by the level of “natural fertility,” max Nr. Quadrant III is simply a child survival schedule: N2 reflects the attrition of some young children through mortality, at a rate which here is assumed to be independent of brood size. Finally, quadrant IV shows the level of old-age support as an increasing concave function of the number of surviving adult offspring, N2. Parents may be able to provide some minimum level of secondperiod consumption for themselves, even without children; hence we show ~(0) = min c2 3 0.L2 The function r(NJ increases at a diminishing

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marginal rate, a property which, in our previous work (David and SundStrom, 1984, Chap. 4), is found to derive from the equilibrium of the nperson intergenerational bargaining process (for which we adopt as a solution concept the so-called kernel of the Aumann-Maschler bargaining set). But it is not the sole basis on which one might suppose there to be diminishing marginal returns for elderly parents from enlarging the size of their brood.13 We now can map out the maximum level of second-period consumption associated with any given level of cl, which gives us the intertemporal consumption constraint # illustrated in quadrant I. Given the intertemporal preference mapping indicated, optimal consumption is at (CT,ci), which in turn corresponds to a derived demand for young children of NT. An improvement in outside earnings opportunities for adult offspring shifts the rr function-and hence the parents’ intertemporal consumption possibility frontier-downward, for the various reasons discussed above. This shift is illustrated in Fig. 1. In our 1984paper we show that when the P function arises from the bargaining model, the frontier #J shifts in such a way that its slope is less negative at each value of cl .I4 Hence if farm parents only cared about maximizing total intertemporal wealtfs at a fixed discount rate, p, the derived demand for children would unambiguously decline under this sort of shift. Under more general assumptions about parental preferences, however, the direction of the child demand shift .cannot be predicted a priori. Although Fig. 1 has been constructed so that cl increases and N1 declines when a shifts downward to v’, it would be equally easy to present a case in which child deman actually increased in response to a diminished asset value of children for old-age support. Substitution away from children would be greater, of course, to the I2 There may also be a minimum child labor requirement, M, in which case ?r(N,) is constant at the level c2 in the interval 0 =Z NZ < M. I3 Neher (1971) assumes the mature offspring become farm laborers, who contribute to production under conditions of diminishing marginal productivity. The total product is then distributed among the entire population according to the customary “share alike ethic” (Neher, 1971, p. 382). By contrast, our previous work (David and Sundstrom, 1984, Chap. 4), assumed farm production to be characterized by fixed input coefficients, with the surplus children working in the labor market at an exogenously determined fIxed wage. The concavity of the w function then results entirely from the n-person bargaining process that determines the distribution between the generations. Even if the rr function were linear, the concavity of (p could be preserved by assuming that the budget constraint (quadrant II) was concave, perhaps because of diminishing marginal product of child labor on the farm. I4 Another story is possible, however: one could suppase that labor-saving technological progress in agriculture was at work, flattening out the slope of the P(&) function, by reducing the m&inal productivity of mature offspring. This line of explanation was proposed by David (1977) to account for the concurrent decline in U.S. rural fertility and the rise in the aggregate conventional savings rate during the period 1830-1890.

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FIG. 2. Improved labor-market opportunities for youngsters induces reduced fertility and increased savings in the form of financial assets.

extent that parents could substitute not only between periods of consumption but also between alternative assets, replacing children with land or financial securities in their “portfolio” of assets, so to speak. The impact of the availability of non-child assets can be readily demonstrated using the two-period diagram (cf. Neher, 1971, p. 388). Consider an alternative asset that yields a fixed interest rate, r, which need not be positive. Parents will invest their savings in children only to the point at which the marginal rate of return on children is equal to the interest rate. Any further investment will be in the alternative asset. For the frontier I#Jin Fig. 2, the switch occurs at the consumption level labeled El. A farm couple with the preferences indicated in the figure would invest max cl - 2, in child assets, and & - c; in the alternative asset. The desired number of young children now corresponds to the consumption level e,; hence N; = fi,, where fi, denotes the value of N, implied by the budget constraint evaluated at &. In general, no matter what level of cl is chosen, NT =S 3,. The introduction of an alternative asset has two interesting implications.

OLD-AGE

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183

First, it is easy to see that for parents who choose to hold any positive amount of the alternative asset, an increase in the asset’s rate of return will make the straight lines in quadrant I, c2 = - (1 + T)C, , slope more severely downward. This will yield a portfolio adjustment in the direction of reduced demand for children and increased demand for the alternative store of wealth. Second, consider the effects of a downward displacement of the function r in response to improved off-farm opportunities for young adults, when an alternative, non-child asset is also available. We noted above there were reasons why such developments would cause the intertemporal consumption frontier (b to shift downward to 4’ in such a way that its slope everywhere becomes less negative. Given a market interest rate on non-child assets, this implies that the switch point between children and alternative assets must increase. Let the new, higher switch point be e; > E1; the new demand for children must correspondingly be reduced, from x to N;. Thus, any parents who would have chosen formerly to consume c; < &, will unambiguously reduce their demand for children when the opportunity set 4 shrinks to 4’. Depending upon the relationship between their rate of time preference and the constant market interest rate, this shift could also raise the proportion of period-l income a couple saved in the form of other assets. The expanded width of the shaded rectangles in Fig. 2 illustrates such an outcome, which could be interpreted as a shift in the demand by farm households for financial (old-age pension) assets. Our analysis therefore suggests that a direct connection-running through the modification of fertility goals-may exist between the development of wage labor markets outside agriculture and the expanded participation of farmers as lenders in rural capital markets.” The shift in demand ought to be viewed as a portfolio adjustment away from assets with whom one must negotiate (children) toward negotiable (financial) assets, induced at least in part by the deterioration of farming parents’ bargaining position relative to their children. This interpretation may be contrasted with some recent work by Ransom and Sutch (1986), who emphasize the role of changing rural “mentality” in the rise of life-cycle savings. New interpretations of familiar facts are always fun, but, since there are more explanatory hypotheses than data, it quickly becomes important to find ways of discarding at least some of them. A distinct virtue of the link traced here between labor market developments and fertility behavior, via the old-age’ security motive, is that it leads fairly immbdiately to empirically refutable implications. In the follow;ing section, we consider one of these, and formulate and test a simple regression model that ” This sequence of market participation is one through which New England settlements appear to have been passing toward the close of the 18th century, according to’the evidence assembled by Rothenberg (1981, 1985).

184

SUNDSTROM

presents a clear alternative hypothesis.

AND DAVID

to models

based on the land availability

2. DETERMINANTS OFTHE GEOGRAPHICAL PATTERN OF RURAL FERTILITY IN THE UNITED STATES DURING THE 1830s The empirical investigation on which we report here follows the lead of a number of previous studies by using multivariate regression analysis to examine the determinants of cross-section state-level variations in the rural white refined birth ratio (cf. Forster and Tucker, 1972; Vinovskis, 1976; Schapiro, 1982). This ratio, which we abbreviate CW, is defined as the number of children under age 10 divided by the number of women at ages 16-44. The widespread use of CW- in describing rural fertility patterns and trends in 19th-century America is probably the best defense for adopting the measure here, as our findings will thereby be the more readily compared with those obtained by other researchers. Obviously, CW is an index describing a population’s age structure and does not directly measure fertility. As such, CW will reflect not only age-specific fertility rates but also age-specific rates of mortality and migration.16 Indeed, the biases introduced by infant and child mortality might actually improve CWs appropriateness in tests of both the land availability and our own hypotheses. Both the Easterlin “target bequest” hypothesis and the account proposed by this paper suggest that parents plan their families on the basis of the anticipated number of adult offspring who will participate in the eventual intergenerational transfer. Parents could be expected to anticipate the loss of some children through mortality. CW, unlike a pure measure of fertility, reflects the attrition of children through infant and young-child mortality. Therefore, although CW is not an exact measure of the parents’ objective, it appears to be conceptually closer to that objective than, say, children ever born, or age-specific rates of marital fertility.17 I6 The numerator undercounts the number of children ever born because it fails to observe children who have died between the ages of 0 and 9. The denominator also is distorted by mortality, insofar as the number of women surviving to be recorded in the census is less than the number responsible for the births within the preceding 10 years. In addition, the ratio is sensitive to in- and out-migration which does not have an agestructure identical to that of the existing population. Although in principle these problems can be corrected, we cannot do so here because we lack adequate data on mortality and migration at the state level for the period under consideration. (McClelland and Zeckhauser, 1982, offer estimates of net internal immigration for the U.S. white population on a regional basis for the antebellum period, but cannot extend their methods down to the state level.) CW is thus at best a biased index of fertility, although in closed populations the bias tends to be small. ” A similar defense can be offered with regard to the “biases” introduced into the CW measure by the effects of migration on the age and sex composition of the population (see Sundstrom and David, 1985, and further discussion below).

OLD-AGE

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185

FERTILITY

TABLE 3 Descriptive Statistics, Definitions, and Sources of Variables Used in’ Regressions Means and standard deviations (in parentheses) Variable name cw40 DRS40 MFR40 RW50 RES40

All States

North

South

1694.9 (369.4) 0.4284 (0.2951) 1.1287 (0.2104) 0.05562 (0.00547) 0.3117 (0.3363)

1554.9 (377.9) 0.5258 (0.3497) 1.1273 (0.2309) 0.05444 (0.00503) 0.4544 (0.3935)

1867.1 (285.7) 0.3087 (0.1488) 1.1305 (0.1914) 0.05709 (0.00583) 0.1359 (0.0984)

Definitions and sources. CW, rural white refined birth ratio (per 1,000 women), 1840: Source, Forster and Tucker (1972, pp. 40-41). DRS, “density of rural settlement,” rural land availability index, 1830 and 1840 (see text): Source, U.S. Dept. of Commerce (1983, Table 13). MFR40, male-female ratio in rural areas, for population aged IO+ (white): Sources, Weiss (1985) for estimates of urban population; U.S. Census of 1840 for white population: RWSO, ratio of daily common labor wage to monthly farm labor wage, both with board, 1850: Source, Lebergott (1964, pp. 539, 541). RES40, “relative employment share,” ratio of nonagricultural labor force to agricultural labor force, 1840: Source, Easterlin (1960, pp. 97-98).

Regression

Models

We now turn to the formulation of a simple regression mode1to account for the pattern of spatial variations in the rural white refined birth ratio for 1840, as exhibited at the state level by Table 1. Posing the rural settlement model as a competing hypothesis, we include in the regression equation a measure of land availability that has been adopted with some success by a proponent of Easterlin’s bequest hypothesis (Schapiro, 1982). Two regressors that test our own hypothesis capture the extent of nonfarm labor market opportunities in each state. The specification of the model presented in this section permits a nested test of the competing hypotheses. Means and standard deviations of the variables used in the regressions are presented in Table 3 for the entire sample and the two regional subsamples, North and South. The variable DRS (“density of rural settlement”) is the proxy for land availability. A variety of proxies for the key independent variable have been used in empirical tests of the settlement or land availability hypothesis. Working with pooled state-level data for the northern states in 1820, 1830, and 1840, Schapira (1982) found that an index of the extent to which a state’s rural places had “filled up” relative to the state’s ultimate peak rural population was a good predictor of the rural white refined birth ratio. Specihcaily, Schapiro’s index is

186

SUNDSTROM

AND DAVID

formed by taking the state’s rural population at the pertinent census date and dividing it by the rural population at its “first clear peak.” A “first clear peak” is fairly easy to find for the northern states, but many southern states’ rural populations continued to grow right up to 1940, the last year for which the definitions of rural and urban are consistent with those of the preceding censuses. Because one of our interests is to examine whether fertility behavior of the rural white population varied substantially between North and South, for reasons to be considered shortly, our own settlement measure is defined slightly differently. The denominator of our variable DRS is the maximum rural population of the state during the period 1790-1940 rather than the maximum ever attained. In practice, there appears to be rather little difference between this measure and Schapiro’s index even in the northern states. A potentially serious problem that could afflict both the settlement and labor market opportunity models is the effect of sex differentials in migration upon the age-specific marital status of the female population. Suppose, for example, that the migration streams to frontier areas were characterized by a high proportion of single males. This would create a surplus of available men in the rural frontier and tend to raise the proportion of women married at every age. This in turn would be reflected in higher child-woman ratios, as a higher proportion of women in such areas would be at risk of pregnancy. The observed correlation between settlement and fertility might in part be due to these sex-differential migration effects rather than to farm couples’ deliberate decisions based upon anticipated fertility outcomes, or to selective migration decisions of families in which children were already present. Because sex-differential migration is reflected in the ratio of adult males to adult females of marriage age in the rural areas, we can hope to control for this effect by including the variable MFR, which is the male-female ratio for the rural population aged 10 and over in the state.” Finally, two independent variables are designed to test the hypothesis that outside labor market opportunities have a negative impact on farm fertility. RW50 is the ratio between the daily wage rate for common (nonagricultural) labor and the monthly farm labor wage rate (both with board) in 1850. The variable is a fairly straightforward indicator of the younger generations’ relative pecuniary gains from leaving, thereby removing their labor services from the precincts of the family farm and other farms symmetrical to it; higher relative nonfarm wage rates might draw offspring away and/or give them a stronger position in bargaining with their parents over the terms of the intergenerational exchange. The ‘* This variable should properly be lagged as much as a decade, because it is conditions in the marriage market during the 1830s that would have the greatest effect on the number of children aged O-9 in 1840. By using the 1840 values, however, we pick up three additional observations in the North.

OLD-AGE

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187

wages of common labor, as opposed to some measure of average wages or earnings, is the most appropriate measure of the earnings opportunities of a young, unskilled farmer outside the agricultural sector. Observations on the wage ratio are not available for the year 1840, and, in any case, the anticipated relative wage a decade hence might be more appropriate on expectational grounds.” RES40 is the relative employment share in the nonagricultural sector divided by the agricultural sector’s labor force share, in 1840. This variable is designed to take account of the fact that not only the relative nonagricultural wage rate but also the development of more ubiquitous employment openings in construction, trade, and manufacturing industries would influence perceptions of the potential attraction such outside opportunities would exert upon the farm family’s young. The dependent variable, the birth ratio in 1840 (our variable CW40), reflects the outcome of fertility behavior over the preceding decade. If one believes that parents based their fertility decisions taken between 1830 and 1840 on contemporaneous circumstances, then the settlement variable DRS should be lagged 5 or 10 years, when possible. On the other hand, both the settlement and labor market opportunities models are based on parental anticipations of the conditions likely to obtain when their children will reach adulthood. If parents had operated with “rational expectations,” future values of the variables would be appropriate. Our preferred assumption is to suppose that parents had a fairly realistic appraisal of the development process that was taking place around them and acted accordingly. Much of the previous work on the antebellum fertility decline has restricted its attention to the northern states in the hope of avoiding effects that were, as one recent investigator has delicately phrased it, “the result of idiosyncratic economic and social structures within specific states” (Schapiro, 1982, p. 585). Slavery. Obviously, any consideration of how rural white fertility behavior in the southern states differed from that in the North cannot avoid focusing upon the effects of the South’s ‘“peculiar institution.” ** Within the analytical framework developed in I9 Charles Calomiris has pointed out that the use of the actual relative wage rate a decade hence may pose potential problems of simultaneity. States with high rural fertility, for example, would exhibit a relatively large rural labor supply and hence a relatively low equilibrium farm wage when that birth cohort began to reach the labor market. The ratio of the future nonagricultural to the agricultural wage, then, would tend to’be posihdy correlated with current rural fertility. Data limitations make it impossible to estimate a two-stage simultaneous equations model, but it should be noted that the partial effect of RW50 turns out to be negative, in spite of this potential positive bias (see below). *’ We set aside the possibility that crop;mix differences may have an effect upon the demand for child labor in agriculture along the lines suggested by Goldin and Sokoloff (1984); there were other, possibly countervailing differences in farm output mix, such as

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this paper, there would seem to be three important mechanisms through which slavery could have inthtenced fertility goals. First, slaves could have substituted for own children in the direct provision of old-age care. To the extent that this substitution occurred, it would have obviated the old-age security motivation for childbearing altogether. This use of slaves, however, probably was relevant for only a small minority of rural white families: those belonging to the upper echelons of the “planter class” who could afford to train and maintain house servants.” For the majority of southern white couples, slaves were not a feasible source of old-age security, and their fertility behavior would have been unaffected on that account. Hence this first effect of slavery on aggregate measures of fertility behavior for the white population is not likely to have been quantitatively significant. Second, as a portfolio asset slaves were exchangeable in a market that at the time was perhaps better-developed than were markets for nonland assets in the North (cf. e.g., Kotlikoff, 1979). Again, this asset would only be available to those farmers who could afford slaves, so that the portfolio substitution effects might be offset by the effects of wealth upon desired fertility. With regard to the portfolio effect, the availability of a well-developed alternative asset could only strengthen the antinatal effect of off-farm opportunities for young adults. As the return to children as assets declined, farmers with the means to do so would have adjusted their “portfolio holdings” away from own-children and toward slaves (as in Fig. 2).22 Finally and most significantly, we feel, the institution of slavery retarded the development of nonfarm opportunities for all young whites in the South, whether or not they came from slaveholding families. In the first place, the existence of slave hire both demeaned wage labor for free

the greater importance of livestock in the North-children being used in herding and livestock care. ‘I The details of the question are complex and cannot be treated here. On the predominance of small and middling-size slave holdings and the numerical unrepresentativeness of the large “planter” households among the slave owning families of the South, cf. Oakes (1982). According to Ransom and Sutch (1977, pp. 16,220-224) only 3-4% of male slaves in rural districts in 1860 were engaged in “service” occupations, and these would have been concentrated on the large slaveholding plantations. As for female slaves, Fogel and Engerman (1974, p. 39) found that 80% were engaged in field work and reported the remainder as engaged as house servants or in such quasi-domestic positions as seamstresses and nurses. The occupational sample involved may overrepresent the situation on the larger plantations, however (cf. David et al., 1976, p. 77 fT); Shammas (1985) has found comparable proportions of female slaves inventoried as field hands on Virginia estates in the 18th century, but, again, the bias of intestacy would tend to exclude the smaller slaveholders from her sample. n On other implications of the capitalization of the labor force and the reallocation of the resulting assets through well-developed (slave) markets, cf. Wright (1978, Chap. 4).

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southerners and placed a ceiling on the free wage.23Because slaves were available for use in urban as well as rural employments, of course, there is no necessity that, for given wage rates, the relative attractiveness of nonfarm wage employments vis-a-vis working for hire on farms was any less in the South than in the North. But the overall development of labor market institutions and employer attitudes that enhanced the attractiveness of opportunities for whites to engage in wage labor was surely less. One must reckon, second, with the influence of plantation slavery in retarding the development of commercial and industrial employments accessible to rural communities in the South. Parker (1970, p. 117) noted how the structure of demand in the slave economy failed to induce “production on a modest local scale, in small shops scattered across the countryside.” This he contrasted with the course of development in the North, where localized production and exchange set into motion the development of technology and commerce, and the accumulation of capital and skills. Posing the North-South contrast in this way naturally lends itself to a counterfactual “experiment”: if off-farm opportunities in the South in 1840 had been as developed as they then were in the North, would the fertility rates of rural southern whites have been depressed to levels similar to those found among their northern counterparts? estimating a separate regression model for the southern states, ba upon our framework of analysis, it will be possible to address this question. Regression

Results

Ordinary least-squares regression results for all the states together and the separate North and South data sets are presented in Table 4. All the variables are log-transformed. The log-log specification generally fits the data better than two simple alternative specifications: straight linear and semi-log.24 The most striking feature of these results is the significantly negative 23 cf. Wright (1982) on the effects of slavery upon the development of wage labor markets within the South; Wright (1986, Chap. 2) develops the theme of the postbellum transition from “laborlordism” to “landlordism” as the liberation of the Southern economy. 24 A simple comparison of the specifications is afforded by using the regressions to predict CW40 (actual values) and then calculating the sum of squared residuals between predicted and actual values. This exercise produces the following results: Sum of squared residuals Linear

Semi-log

Log-log

All states 1,118,810 997,584 666,530 North 566,251 501,095 569,356 South 100,788 85,524 30,367 The fits are all about equally good in the North, but the log-log specification is substantially better in the South and for the combined regions.

- 0.0803

-0.1661

0.0273

0.0835

Beta

(0.4907) 16 0.611

4.0930* (1.3991) 0.3606 (0.6308) 0.00783 (0.09151) - 0.1547** (0.0667) - 1.0416**

Coefficient

Note. Standard errors in parentheses. p coefficients explained in text. * is significantly different from 0 at I%, one-tail test. ** is significantly different from 0 at 5%, one-tail test.

N Adj. RZ

LRWSO

LRES40

LDRS40

(0.2122) 29 0.776

4.7228* (0.6106) 0.5078 (0.2871) 0.0269 (0.0484) -0.1799* (0.0243) -0.8228*

Constant

LMFR40

Coefficient

Variable

All States

North

-0.1017

-0.1428

0.0080

0.0593

Beta

TABLE 4 Regressions of Rural White Refined Birth Ratio, 1840 (dependent Variable:

4.7164* (0.3032) 0.6530* (0.1426) 0.0461 (0.0321) -0.1547* (0.0153) -0.8538* (0.1069) 13 0.951

Coefficient

LCW40) South

-

0.0834

-0.1429

0.0468

0.1074

Beta

Y c 8

!ii u

8

u 2

OLD-AGE

AND FAMILY

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191

coefficient on each of the labor market variables in all three regressions. Granting the inherent limitations of such a small and aggregative set of observations, these estimates must be considered strong encouragement for further investigation of the “outside opportunities” hypothesis. By contrast the rural settlement density variable has a positive coefficient in each regression (although none of the estimated coefficients can be considered significantly different from zero), contradicting the prediction of the land availability hypothesis. Can the white farm populations of the North and South be said to have behaved in more or less the same way with regard to fertility? Demographic studies at a less aggregated level indicate that the two populations could be distinguished by the much lessextensive use made of effective marital fertility control among Southerners who married before 1859(David and Sanderson, 1986), however, although according to Steckel (1979, p. 340) southern whites, in effect, restricted their fertility by delaying marriage in response to economic circumstances. The possibility is not absolutely precluded that such adjustments in nuptuality alone had effects on aggregate fertility that were indistinguishable from the results of combined adjustments of nuptuality and family limitation within marriagez5 In the present instance the Chow test would fail to reject the hypothesis that the coefficients for the separate regional regressions are the same, if it were the case that the estimated variances of the error terms were identical in the two regressions, But the latter condition is not satisfied: from Table 4 itself one may see that the fit is obviously much tighter for the South, so it is not surprising that a two-tail F-test at the 2% level rejects the hypothesis that the estimated error variances are equal. Hence, the Chow test for homogeneity across regions is inconclusive. One may remark, nevertheless, that at the level of aggregation at which these econometric exercises are conducted, the qualitative similarity between the regions is perhaps greater than might have been supposed, given their very different economic structures and the independent evidence of significant contrasts in behavior at the microdemographic level. This may stand as an extra caution, if such is needed, against drawing strong inferences about microeconomic and demographic behavior from aggregative statisticalrelationships such as are being reexamined on this occasion. Znterpretations

and Speculations

on North-South

Differences

The regression coefficients presented in Table 4 are directly interpretable as response-elasticities, but the /3 coefficients listed in the same table *j cf. Wrigley “homogeneity” century through marital fertility

(1985) for an argument essentially in this vein, referring to the supposed of the mechanism of population adjustment in France from the early 18th to the latter quarter of the 19th century, i.e., spanning the transition to control.

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provide a clearer picture of the relative magnitudes of the effects exerted on the level of fertility by the several variables. The betas weight each regression coefficient by the standard deviation of the corresponding (logarithmic) variable computed h-om the whole (national) sample, thereby affording a standardized comparison of effects between the two regions. The relative employment share variable appears to be the most consistently powerful cause of proportional variations in the child-woman ratio in 1840 (i.e., changes in LCW40), and it had approximately the same relative impact within each of the two regions of the country. The relative wage appears somewhat more important in the North than in the South. Only in the South did the male-female ratio have a significant effect, being positive there, as expected. We can conclude this examination of the regression results by considering what they imply by way of an answer to the counterfactual question broached earlier in regard to the fertility rates among the white population of the rural South. In particular, if off-farm labor market opportunities in the South had resembled those in the North in 1840, how would the southern child-woman ratio have compared with that ‘observed in the North at that date? An answer. is obtained from the following procedure. First, we take the mean values of RW50 .and RES40 for the North and South data sets (unweighted means across states), and form the ratio of each variable’s mean in the North to its mean in the South. This gives us a scaling factor by which to blow up the labor market variables in the southern states to their overall northern level, while preserving betweenstate variability. Then we use the scaled-up market variables in conjunction with the actual values of the other (exogenous) variables of the model to predict CW40 from the regression equation that has been estimated for the South. It is easy to see from the logarithmic form of the regression model that the counterfactual level of CW40 for any state in the South (CW40”,) must be given by cw40;

= q:q:

cw40$,,

where q,,, is the North-South scaling factor for RW50, Q is the same for REMO, x, and x, are the corresponding coefficient estimates from the southern regression, and CW4Os is the fitted (“predicted”) value of CW40 using the actual values of the exogenous variables. For the southern states, the mean of CW40s is 1866, whereas the mean of the counter-factual, CW40& is 1613. The child-woman ratio under counterfactual labor market conditions is therefore rather close to the mean value of CW40 fitted (“predicted”) from the northern regression estimates and observations, CW40N, which is 1542. Thus, it appears that one may add a demographic dimension to Parker’s speculations on “what might have been,” if only Emancipation had occurred in 1789, or before: rural white fertility in the South might well have followed a course during

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the fh-st half of the 19th century which hewed more closely to that taken by the northern section of the country. On the basis of the cahzulation just carried out, we would say that a more precipitate decline in Southern fertility levels would have ensued, not as a consequence of intensifted agricultural settlement in the absence of slavery, but rather, as a result of a difference in the path of development both with regard to the growth of commerce and industry, and the penetration of those activities into the economic life of the region’s rural population. This ought not be taken to mean that the overall demographic impact of the South’s “peculiar institution” was one of quickening the growth of the free white population. Quite the contrary. The total population of the North grew approximately twice as rapidly as did that of the South between the Revolution and the Civil War, essentially because it was absorbing immigrants from abroad. As Gavin Wright (1987)has perceptively remarked, one of the major contrasts between the slave regime of the antebellum South and the free labor regime of its northern neighbor lay precisely in the great encouragement given to immigration by landowner and employer interests in the North, whereas slaveholding interests exercised an influence that, by comparison, discouraged the influx of bat slave and free peoples. Thus, it would be more correct to say that the more direct effects of slavery in slowing the growth of the region’s population were partially mitigated through the “peculiar ~~stitut~o~‘s99 indirect impact upon the fertility of the rural white southerners. 3. CONCLUSIONS

The development of labor markets and the nonagricultural sector of the antebellum economy hitherto has been unwarrantedly ignored or exphcitly eschewed in framing explanations for the early rural fertility transition experienced in the United States. Obviously, further empirical studies based upon disaggregated data will be necessary before stronger conclusions can be reached. The preliminary results presented here should nevertheless serve to encourage continued research into the connections we have suggested be drawn between the process of labor market development, the changing terms of intergenerational exchange, and the decline in farm family fertility. We also have cast further doubts upon the plausibility of the Easterhn “target bequest” model as the latest successor in the Franklin-Malthus tradition of homeostatic population adjustment theories, and more generally upon the applicability of the local land availability hypothesis to the P&hcentury U.S. fertility transition. At the very least, we may now look forward to future inquiries which will take seriously the idea that the phenomenon of rural fertility decline reflected important discontinuities, and was not simply a manifestation of long-present homeostatic tendencies set in motion by the inevitable erosion of the frontier; that it was intimately

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associated with the processes of commercial and industrial development which were working a profound qualitative, historical transformation of the economy and social structure of America during the antebellum era. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are grateful for the penetrating critical comments, corrective suggestions, and encouragement received as responses to earlier versions of this paper from S. Ryan Johansson, Warren C. Sanderson, Gavin Wright, Gregory Clark, Charles Calomiris, Nancy Folbre, Joel Mokyr, Robert Willis, Morton Schapiro, Maris Vinovskis, and Richard Sutch. This research has been pursued as part of the Stanford Project on the History of Fertility Control and drew financial support from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development under Grant 1 ROl HD 17388-2.

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