Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jan, 1980, Volume 48, Issue 1

Testing the Quantity-Quality Fertility Model: The Use of Twins as a Natural Experiment

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1912026
p. 227-240

Kenneth I. Wolpin, Mark R. Rosenzweig

The predictive content of the quantity-quality model of fertility is analyzed and the empirical information required for verification under a minimal set of restrictions on the utility function is described. It is demonstrated that commodity-independent compensated price effects must be known to infer the existence of the unobservable interdependent shadow prices of the model with a relatively weak structure imposed on preference orderings. A method of using multiple birth events to substitute for these exogenous prices is proposed and applied to household data from India.


Log In To View Full Content