پژوهشهای اقتصادی (Sep 2020)
Testing The Quantity-Quality Model of Fertility in Iran’s Urban Families
Abstract
The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between quantity and quality of children in Iran. The quantity-quality models of fertility primarily assume that there is a substitution relationship between quantity and quality of children. The ambiguity in sign and final effect of newborns on the quality of existing children and the linearity or nonlinearity of such effect led us to investigate the relationship between quantity and quality of children in Iran. In this context, by using cross-section expenditure and income data of urban households in 2015, first we draw out a sample of 5624 children over 25 years of age in urban areas. Then, we investigate the relationship between quantity and quality by applying OLS method with Huber-White robust standard errors. The results show that there is significant, negative, and nonlinear relationship between family size and quality of children, but the size and sign of this relationship are not the same for all children, that is for first, second, and third births there is a complementary relationship between quantity and quality of children, and for births of more than three children there is a substitution link between quality and quantity of children. According to the results, we recommend that the population growth policies consider the size of families. If the policy of population growth focuses only on small families having no children or those having less than three children, population growth will not be detrimental to its quality and will improve the human capital of society.
