Selected Fertility and Racial Inequality

Racial inequality can be affected by changes in race-specific fertility patterns that influence the composition of births, in addition to post-birth factors like schools and labor markets that have been the focus of most prior research. This paper documents a large decline in the fertility of southern African American women after 1964 and argues that these fertility patterns likely led to substantial reductions in racial inequality in the next generation through a selection effect. I first show that the Black–white difference in the general fertility rate fell by approximately 40 percent between 1964 and 1970 among southern women, with no change in racial fertility differences in the North over this period. I also show that these fertility declines were much stronger among socioeconomically disadvantaged southern Black women, for instance, those with eight or fewer years of education and with four or more existing children, which led southern Black children born after 1964 to come from systematically smaller and more educated families. I then directly estimate the association between racial fertility differences and racial differences in the education and earnings of the next generation in a two-way fixed effects framework and find that selective fertility declines were conditionally associated with a reduction in the Black–white education gap of approximately 0.15 years (22 percent) and a reduction in the Black–white earnings gap of approximately six log points (16 percent). These patterns suggest that a substantial share of the Black socioeconomic progress of the 1960s and 1970s was due to selective fertility declines among less advantaged African American women in the South.