Fertility Responses to Short-Term Economic Stress: Exploring the Effects of a Wealth Shock in a Pre-Transitional Settler Colony

Jeanne Cilliers, Lund University
Martine Mariotti, Australian National University
Igor Martins, Lund University

Whether pre-transitional couples exercised deliberate control over their fertility has been a keystone question for much of the historical demography research produced over the last half-century. The search for evidence of parity-dependent spacing before the transition is important because if found, lends credence to the notion that some couples already knew how to achieve their desired family size and that they were doing so prior to the transition, albeit not in a transition-initiating way. During periods of short-term economic stress for example, couples may have decided to postpone their next birth to ease the burden of a shock. The pre-transitional South African settler context is ideal for an investigation of fertility-limiting behaviour in light of short-term economic stress, captured here by a large negative wealth shock. The 1834 emancipation of slaves represented a substantial loss of wealth to many Cape Colony slaveholders, with records showing that they received, on average, between 40 and 50% of the market value of their slaves. From slaveholder compensations claim forms we derive the average shortfall per slave - the difference between the actual value of slaves at market prices and the amount received from the compensation scheme - for each slaveholder. To this, we link complete birth histories of settler women from the South African Families database. Using this combination of novel data sources and event history models that look simultaneously at stopping, spacing as well as postponement we investigate the effect of an unanticipated wealth shock on all dimensions of fertility limitation. Crucially, because the ultimate compensation received was, we argue, random, uncorrelated with wealth and unexpected, we can interpret the effects as causal, therein, bringing some much-needed resolution to this longstanding debate.

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 Presented in Session 158. Inequality, Economic Stress, and Demographic Behavior: Sub-Session 1. Balancing Economic Stress in the Pre-Modern World.