TY - BOOK AU - Doepke,Matthias AU - Hannusch,Anne AU - Kindermann,Fabian AU - Tertilt,Michèle ED - National Bureau of Economic Research. TI - The Economics of Fertility: A New Era T2 - NBER working paper series PY - 2022/// CY - Cambridge, Mass. PB - National Bureau of Economic Research N1 - April 2022; Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers N2 - In this survey, we argue that the economic analysis of fertility has entered a new era. First-generation models of fertility choice were designed to account for two empirical regularities that, in the past, held both across countries and across families in a given country: a negative relationship between income and fertility, and another negative relationship between women's labor force participation and fertility. The economics of fertility has entered a new era because these stylized facts no longer universally hold. In high-income countries, the income-fertility relationship has flattened and in some cases reversed, and the cross-country relationship between women's labor force participation and fertility is now positive. We summarize these new facts and describe new models that are designed to address them. The common theme of these new theories is that they view factors that determine the compatibility of women's career and family goals as key drivers of fertility. We highlight four factors that facilitate combining a career with a family: family policy, cooperative fathers, favorable social norms, and flexible labor markets. We also review other recent developments in the literature, and we point out promising new directions for future research on the economics of fertility UR - https://www.nber.org/papers/w29948 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.3386/w29948 ER -