Tracking ~30 countries by birth cohort, cohorts that grew up with higher life expectancy and higher income per person end up with fewer children. The study aligns early-life conditions (ages 0–14/18/25) to completed cohort fertility and uses mixed-effects models to isolate within-country changes, with placebo pre-birth windows as a check.
— It reframes fertility decline as a developmental response to improved early-life conditions, guiding pronatal policy beyond short-term subsidies toward the deeper drivers of reproductive timing and family size.
2025.10.07
50% relevant
Both the paper and this idea tie modern conditions to lower completed fertility; the article extends the mechanism beyond behavior and timing to evolutionary relaxation and possible genetic retention of low‑fertility traits via ART.
Tyler Cowen
2025.09.20
55% relevant
Chile’s rapid, development‑era fertility collapse and the reported surge in vasectomies align with the broader pattern that improved security and prosperity tend to depress completed fertility, offering a contemporary Latin American case consistent with the cohort‑development mechanism.
Davide Piffer
2025.08.29
70% relevant
Piffer’s system‑GMM estimates find that once lagged cohort fertility is included, early‑life GDP, life expectancy, and child mortality lose significance for completed fertility—directly challenging the earlier within‑between (Mundlak) finding that safer childhoods lower fertility.
Davide Piffer
2025.08.28
90% relevant
Davide Piffer’s within–country cohort models find that cohorts exposed to higher life expectancy during school-age years (6–18) have lower completed fertility, directly extending the prior claim that safer childhoods depress fertility; he also adds that child mortality in ages 0–5 and life expectancy in 6–18 operate via different mechanisms.
Davide Piffer
2025.08.24
100% relevant
Within–between mixed-effects results linking cohort-averaged early-life life expectancy and log GDP to lower completed fertility, robust across windows and a pre-birth placebo exposure.