This paper reviews Gary Becker's contributions to the economic analysis of fertility, from his 1960 paper introducing … the quantity-quality tradeoff to later work linking the economics of fertility to the theory of economic growth. …

The historical fertility transition is the process by which much of Europe and North America went from high to low … fertility in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This transformation is central to recent accounts of long …-run economic growth. Prior to the transition, women bore as many as eight children each, and the elasticity of fertility with …

This paper explores gendered patterns of time use as an explanatory factor behind fertility trends in the developed … decades of unprecedented fertility decline in the industrialized world, only a handful of countries in the West exhibit … replacement fertility rates - around two children per woman. Paradoxically, birth rates are substantially lower in countries in …

Since the seminal work of Becker, the dynamics of endogenous fertility has been based on the trade-off faced by parents … upstream, so as to keep fertility endogenous. We do that by adding a negative "sibship size effect" on human capital formation …, the possibility of a jump from a state with high fertility and low income to a state with low fertility and high income …