GLOBALIZATION, GENDERED LABOR MARKETS, AND FERTILITY PATTERNS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1990-2018

Abstract

Over the last half-century, the United States has experienced several monumental social and economic shifts, including decreased fertility, increased women’s employment, decreased men’s labor force participation, deindustrialization and a subsequent transition from a manufacturing to a service economy, and an ever-growing trade deficit. Given the body of literature that attests to the relationship between trade and employment and between fertility and employment, it stands to reason that there may also be a relationship between trade exposure and fertility. Furthermore, as the male-dominated manufacturing industry has declined, the service industry has risen to take its place in the American economic structure. Women have historically been more likely to work in services than any other industry, from clerical and domestic work in the early twentieth century to now, where they make up more than half of service workers overall (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2021; Jacobs & Bahn, 2019). Thus, it is possible that any impact of trade exposure on fertility may also have a gendered explanatory dimension. Through regression analysis of local labor markets, this paper attempts to tease out these relationships between trade, labor, gender, and fertility. I find that the relationship between trade, labor, and fertility is not as clear as I’d hypothesized. Instead, my results show that secular fertility decline cannot easily be related to these economic dimensions over time; however, there are differential impacts across space, indicating that, in a particular year, trade and gendered labor dynamics are associated with fertility within localities. These results complicate the existing evidence by separating out the time-series and cross-sectional aspects of these data and relationships to demonstrate that economic factors may impact fertility choice at a local level, but do not tell the full story of fertility decline over time.