Fertility and the Plough
By A. Alesina, Paola Giuliano, Nathan Nunn. Social Science Research Network, 2011
115 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The current study finds that societies which historically engaged in plough agriculture today have lower fertility. We argue, and provide ethnographic evidence, that the finding is explained by the fact that with plough agriculture, children, like women, are relatively less useful in the field. The plough requires strength and eliminates the need for weeding, a task particularly suitable for women and children. This in turn generates a preference for fewer children, lowering fertility.
Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b06995b0ac70a73bca28bfdc4d75cc90598d404c
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Citations in the corpus
- Economic development, structural change, and women’s labor force participation: (2013, unknown): “This is consistent with the claim of Boserup (1970) of the relative importance of female labor in agriculture in countries not traditionally using plows, creating path dependencies as discussed by Alesina et al. (2011, 2013).”
- Modern gender roles and agricultural history: the Neolithic inheritance (2015, unknown): “[4] Alesina, A.”
- Selection, Agriculture, and Cross-Country Productivity Differences (2013, background): “…One widely proposed hypothesis for this gender wage gap in agriculture is that women are less productive at agricultural work than men on average (e.g. Goldin and Sokoloff (1982, 1984), Foster and Rosenzweig (1996), Pitt, Rosenzweig, and Hassan (2010), and Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (2011)).”