Car seat laws have the unintended consequence of large reductions in birth rates, due to the outsized cost of having a third child in a car seat. Nickerson and Solomon estimate that these laws are currently preventing approximately 8,000 annual births, around 141 times greater than plausible estimates of the number of lives saved in car crashes.


Effect of Car Seat Laws on Fertility

- Race
- Education
- Religion
- Contraceptive use
- Abortion
- Marriage
- Female participation in the labor force
- Value of children for agricultural purposes
- Car seat laws


University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

The ability of an individual or couple to reproduce through normal sexual activity. Health economists also study the factors that influence an individual or couple to produce offspring.

Fertility

Nickerson, Jordan and Solomon, David H., Car Seats as Contraception (July 31, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3665046 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3665046

Car Seats as Contraception

Factors Affecting Fertility

The most recent decline in birth rates is also puzzling under standard economic theories of fertility. A recovering economy ought to have increased the budget set for available children, and led to a subjective sense of them being cheaper, unless the costs of having children are rising faster than incomes.

Standard Economic Theories of Fertility

The U.S. has experienced a series of dramatic shifts in fertility over the last century. After the huge decline in the mid-20th century, birth rates began to rebound in the 1970s, such that the U.S. had an above-replacement total fertility rate of 2.12 children per woman as recently as 2007. Since then, TFRs have declined in ten out of the eleven subsequent years, reaching an all-time low of 1.73 in 2018.

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