In high-income countries, relation of women’s labor force participation & fertility is now positive; father contribution rates to child-raising are more important for fertility; & fathers seem most interested in children in Norway, the least in Russia

The Economics of Fertility: A New Era. Matthias Doepke, Anne Hannusch, Fabian Kindermann & Michèle Tertilt. NBER Working Paper 29948. Apr 2022. DOI 10.3386/w29948

Abstract: In this survey, we argue that the economic analysis of fertility has entered a new era. First-generation models of fertility choice were designed to account for two empirical regularities that, in the past, held both across countries and across families in a given country: a negative relationship between income and fertility, and another negative relationship between women's labor force participation and fertility. The economics of fertility has entered a new era because these stylized facts no longer universally hold. In high-income countries, the income-fertility relationship has flattened and in some cases reversed, and the cross-country relationship between women's labor force participation and fertility is now positive. We summarize these new facts and describe new models that are designed to address them. The common theme of these new theories is that they view factors that determine the compatibility of women's career and family goals as key drivers of fertility. We highlight four factors that facilitate combining a career with a family: family policy, cooperative fathers, favorable social norms, and flexible labor markets. We also review other recent developments in the literature, and we point out promising new directions for future research on the economics of fertility.

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h/t Tyler Cowen https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/04/new-developments-in-the-economics-of-fertility.html : Another result is that quality vs. quantity tradeoff models for children no longer perform very well.  And fertility-education relationships are greatly weakened, just as the income-fertility relationships are.  The marketization of childcare is likely an important cause of this shift.

Italy and Spain are two countries where the income-fertility relationship is not being reversed.

Father contribution rates to child-raising are growing in importance for fertility.  Fathers seem most interested in their children in Norway, and least interested in Russia, of the countries sampled.

If a couple disagrees on having another kid, the chance they do is relatively small.

In Denmark in 2015, six percent of all births occurred with some kind of medical help related to conception.

There are now positive correlations between public childcare provision, though I do not in this paper see any reliable causal estimate.

The paper has a section on social norms, but it oddly fails to consider religion.

There is some evidence for peer effects mattering for fertility, for instance in a workplace.