Re-Examining Women’s Wages and Fertility: Has the Relationship Changed over Time?

Kelly Musick, University of Southern California
Sarah Edgington, University of California, Los Angeles

The opportunity cost or cost-of-time perspective posits that the higher wages and better employment opportunities of the more educated make time out of the labor force for childbearing and child rearing more costly. Increased options to combine work and family, however, undermine assumptions of this model and may weaken or even reverse the negative relationship between wages and fertility. We use rich longitudinal data from two cohorts of U.S. women to explore change in the relationship between wages and fertility.