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A Cohort Perspective on Latin America's Fertility Transition
Regina Calles
& Tom Vogl
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Working Paper 35326
DOI 10.3386/w35326
Issue Date June 2026
Latin America's momentous fertility transition is now in the domain of history, allowing a cohort perspective on the decline of completed fertility. Using census microdata from 17 Latin American countries, we track female birth cohorts from the 1920s to the 1970s by subnational region to document the extent to which cohort fertility decline coincided with other demographic and socioeconomic processes. Across cohorts within subnational regions, children ever born fell one-for-one with mortality decline. Expansions in urbanization, multigenerational living, women's and husbands' education, women's employment, and the non-agricultural sector all predicted declines in ever-born and surviving fertility, but women's education and sectoral composition were the dominant forces after covariate adjustment. Fertility decline was not systematically linked with improvements in children's outcomes, including school enrollment, literacy, primary completion, and non-employment. These cohort facts challenge theories of fertility decline centered on women's work and children's education but support others emphasizing women's education.
Acknowledgements and Disclosures
We thank conference participants at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and PAA for comments; Nicholas Mark for feedback on an early draft; and Gongyu Zhou for research assistance. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Regina Calles and Tom Vogl, "A Cohort Perspective on Latin America's Fertility Transition," NBER Working Paper 35326 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35326.
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Labor Economics
Demography and Aging
History
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Development and Growth
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Children and Families
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Gender in the Economy
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