Childless or Child-fewer? Childlessness and Parity Progression where Fertility is Below Replacement

Michael Geruso; Dean Spears

doi:10.3386/w33913

Childless or Child-fewer? Childlessness and Parity Progression where Fertility is Below Replacement

Michael Geruso & Dean Spears

Working Paper 33913

DOI 10.3386/w33913

Issue Date June 2025

Birth rates are falling worldwide, in every region. Falling birth rates can be decomposed into two components: (1) an increase in childlessness (i.e., lifetime nulliparity), and (2) fewer children ever born to women who have at least one child (completed cohort fertility among the parous). This paper quantifies the contributions of these two components for women in advanced economies in Europe, North and South America, and southeast Asia, and for recent cohorts in Indian districts. In both samples, we find that the birth rate among parous women is an important component in explaining low overall birth rates. Childlessness explains only 38% of the decline in cohort fertility in the advanced economies in our analysis. In the Indian context, childlessness accounts for only 6% of the difference between high-fertility and below-replacement districts. Moreover, in many country-cohorts and Indian districts, average completed cohort fertility would be below the replacement threshold even when considering only women who do have children—that is, omitting the zeros from the average. This is in tension with widespread recent narratives that attribute falling birth rates to increasing childlessness: To the contrary, in many populations average birth rates even among parents would be low enough eventually to cause depopulation.

We thank Rachel Wolfe and Anastasia Berg for the the initial conversations and collaborations that inspired this research. This research was supported by grant P2CHD042849 awarded to the Population Research Center at UT Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the National Institutes of Health or the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Dean Spears
In the past, Dean Spears, while on leave without pay from UT-Austin, has been paid a salary as Executive Director of r.i.c.e., a doing business as name of RICE Institute, Inc, a 501(c) public charity non-profit corporation online at www.riceinstitute.org.

Separately from r.i.c.e., Dean Spears has personally been paid as a Short Term Consultant at the World Bank, as a consultant for IPFRI, and as a short-term Visiting Fellow and Lecturer at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He has had travel funded by the Gates Foundation, the World Bank, the Royal Economic Society, and by many universities for a conference or presentation. He was paid an honorarium by McMaster University as the 2017 Labelle Lecturer in Health Economics and by Penn State University for his 2024 DeJong Lecture in demography. His AIIS book prize paid a subvention to Harper Collins for his book Where India Goes with Diane Coffey, for which Spears and Coffey waived royalties. His Austin Robinson Memorial Prize resulted in a prize payment to r.i.c.e. He received author royalties from Simon and Schuster for his forthcoming book After the Spike.

This research paper received no funding and used only publicly available data. Dean Spears has received research funding from the NIH, GiveWell, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Musk Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Founders Pledge, USAID, the IGC, Longview Philanthropy, and UT-Austin, as well as from the individual donors to r.i.c.e. No funder had any role or influence in the research process or findings. No party had the right to review this paper prior to its circulation. This paper does not necessarily reflect the views of any funder.
MARC RIS BibTeΧ

Childless or Child-fewer? Childlessness and Parity Progression where Fertility is Below Replacement

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