TY - CHAP AB - Abstract This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure).These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated.Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child.Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period.One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets. VL - 40 SN - 978-1-78441-150-3, 978-1-78441-149-7/0147-9121 DO - 10.1108/S0147-912120140000040001 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0147-912120140000040001 AU - Cinyabuguma Matthias AU - Lord William AU - Viauroux Christelle PY - 2014 Y1 - 2014/01/01 TI - Explaining the Revolution in U.S. Fertility, Schooling, and Women’s Work among Households Formed in 1875, 1900, and 1925 T2 - Factors Affecting Worker Well-being: The Impact of Change in the Labor Market T3 - Research in Labor Economics PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 1 EP - 78 Y2 - 2024/03/28 ER -