From Empty Pews to Empty Cradles: Fertility Decline Among European Catholics

1. From Empty Pews to Empty Cradles:Fertility Decline Among European Catholics BY ELI BERMAN LAURENCE R. IANNACCONE GIUSEPPE RAGUSA NBER Working Paper #18350, 2012

2. Fertility in Western Europe

3. Implications of Fertility Decline • TFR of below 1.4 is well below replacement rate (2.1) • Increases demand for immigrant workers (national identity) • Social Security-type programs • Italy and Spain projected to have one retiree per working person by 2050. • Other costs of having an elderly-heavy population

4. The Puzzle Why has fertility fallen so much? • Especially without much of an increase in female labor force participation. • Claim can’t explain with Becker and Lewis. Previous explanations: • Housing prices • Women’s education

5. How might declining religiosity matter? Church attendance rates, 1960-1990

6. How might declining religiosity matter?

7. How to figure out which of these are important? • Use decline in nuns/priests after Vatican II to determine that it is a causal effect. • So which causal effect? • Explanation needs to be something that relates to Catholics specifically, since Protestants also saw a decline in religiosity but a much weaker drop in fertility. • Dramatic timing also makes 1, 2, and 3 less likely. • Priests are more important for some stories; nuns for others.

8. Vatican II • Historically, Catholics have had higher fertility than Protestants because of doctrine, pro-natalism, an strong sense of community. • Vatican II, 1962-1965, seen as exogenous (unanticipated) change to Church doctrine and practice • Had surprising effects: * Rapid growth trends reversed immediately * Numbers, attendance, # religious, schools, hospitals Why??? • Raised expectations that were then unfulfilled? • Decreased value of priesthood/sisterhood?

9. American Nuns Since 1948

10. Nuns in Europe, 1960-2000

11. Nuns in Europe

12. Nuns and Social Services • In Italy, “until 1966 virtually all [pre-schools] were private [and] seventy percent of nursery and kindergarten children were cared for by religious sisters.” ! ! ! ! ! • In U.S., 50% of Catholic children went to Catholic Schools in 1950s. Now about 20%. • Catholic hospitals provided 20% of hospital beds • Between 1962 and 1992, orders of sisters shrank 42%, shut down 23% of hospitals, 15% of universities, and 42% of elementary schools. • THE MEDIAN AGE IN 2000 WAS 69.

13. Nuns and Social Services

14. Amazing Picture, or Amazing Coincidence?

15. Model for how this change could affect fertility • Based on Becker and Gronau models • Max utility, which is a function of # of kids, consumption per family member, and deviance from fertility norms. • A budget constraint, which religion can enter in 3 ways: • Provide high-quality child rearing services, decreasing time cost of children. • Provide access to services, potentially conditional on religiosity. • Religious norms reduce effective wages of women, lowering opportunity cost of children.

16. Fertility and childbearing costs

17. Model’s predictions: • Fertility likely increases in religiosity, through norms, costs, and education/LFP. • Better quality unambiguosly increases fertility through lower costs. • If access to services is preferentially provided to the more religious, then service quality and religiosity will be complements in fertility. They test the model, using church attendance as measure of religiosity and nuns per capita as measure of quality.

18. Cool data!

19. Estimation Use a 5-year difference-in-differences model to see how changes in nuns and church attendance affect fertility.

20. Table 3

21. Main Results Use a 5-year difference-in-differences model to see how changes in nuns and church attendance affect fertility. • In an entirely Catholic country, a ten percentage point decline in church attendance predicts a TFR reduction of 0.2 children. Not driven by LFP. • No effects of attendance on fertility for Protestants. • Each nun per 10,000 Catholics results in an extra 383 to 408 children! “Apparently the vows that nuns took not to bear their own children are more than compensated for by their effect on the fertility of others!”

22. Other Results Table 4: Effect of nuns is greater when attendance is higher. Table 5: Is it priests, or is it nuns? So far, nuns could be proxying for priests.

23. Table 5

24. Other Results Table 4: Effect of nuns is greater when attendance is higher. Table 5: Is it priests, or is it nuns? So far, nuns could be proxying for priests. Conclude that about 30% of the unexplained reduction in fertility in Europe is accounted for by reduced service provision by the Catholic Church.

25. Is it believable? • Possibility of multiple equilibria, where some women work and have few kids, and others don’t and have lots of kids. • Raising the cost of children could move all the women to a low-fertility equilibrium, causing a big decline in fertility. • Also possible that each nun accounted for a large faith-based operation that had a large effect.

26. Policy Implications What does this mean Europe or the Catholic Church should do if concerned about fertility decline?