the fertility dividend

The Fertility Dividend: Family Size and the Decline in Child Poverty Adam Looney · working paper

Child poverty under the Supplemental Poverty Measure fell 20 percentage points between 1967 and 2024, a decline conventionally credited to income growth and changing taxes and transfers. This paper shows that 5.4 points — 27% of the decline, or 3.7 million fewer children in poverty in 2024 — instead reflect a fertility dividend: smaller families spread finite resources across fewer children. The dividend is quantified with a rank-preserving transport of the family-size distribution, and the mechanism corroborated with twin-induced parity transitions.

Paper: PDF  ·  Appendix: PDF  ·  Replication code: github.com/adamlooney/looney-fertility-poverty

Citation

@unpublished{looney2026fertilitydividend,
  author = {Looney, Adam},
  title  = {The Fertility Dividend: Family Size and the Decline in Child Poverty},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {Working paper, University of Utah and the Brookings Institution},
  url    = {https://www.adamlooney.com/data/fertility-dividend}
}