Estimating the Lifecycle Fertility Consequences of WWII Using Bunching

In the Netherlands, an immediate baby boom followed the end of WWII and the baby bust of the 1930s. I propose a novel application of the bunching methodology to examine whether the war shifted the timing of fertility or changed women’s completed fertility. I disaggregate the number of births by age for cohorts of mothers, and estimate counterfactual distributions of births by exploiting that women experienced the war at different ages. I show that the rise in fertility after the liberation did not make up for the “missed†births that did not occur prior to the war, as fertility would have been 9.4% higher in absence of WWII.