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What Has Been Driving World Population Growth?
The world’s population more than doubled from 1960 to 2021 despite the birth rate falling. Declining death rates in lower-income countries drove the growth.
Declining Birth Rates and Global Population Change
Learn what the world population would be, and how it would be distributed across low- and high-income countries, if birth rates hadn’t declined for the past 60 years.
Working Paper
What's Behind Declining Birth Rates in the U.S.?
Using the National Survey of Family Growth, this paper explores reasons behind the falling birth rate in the United States. The analysis confirms that newer generations of women are less likely to have any children than generations that came before. Comparing outcomes among women at the same age, two sources for this decline are identified: (1) a dramatic decrease in the desire to have children, but only among the youngest generation in the sample (Gen Z) and (2) an increase in the medical difficulty of having children among all generations of women since the Boomer generation. Various ...
Declining Fertility Rates across the World
The average number of births per woman—one factor affecting population growth—has been declining among both high-income and low-income countries for several decades.
Newsletter
The Baby Bust: How Economics Can Explain Demographic Changes
Learn how economic forces and opportunity costs help explain declining birth rates in wealthy nations.
Working Paper
Creative Destruction and the Reallocation of Capital in Rural and Urban Areas
We test the implications of Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction on food manufacturer births and deaths using a dynamic, unobserved effects count model with correlated random effects. We find evidence of a creative destruction process via the interaction of previous firm birth and death, which is correlated with higher rates of contemporaneous firm birth and death in a given location. Results support Marshall’s notion of “something is in the air,” as evidenced by the strong correlation between sources of unobserved heterogeneity in the birth and death processes. Consistent with ...