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Fertility, migration, and altruism

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Intergenerational altruism and fertility are arguably linked, therefore immigrants might self-select on eventual fertility. Eli Berman’s work shows that Soviet Jews who migrated to Israel (despite high migration costs) averaged almost one child more than members of the same birth cohorts who migrated later, at lower cost.

Image courtesy of interviewee. June 20, 2024

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This video discusses the personal narrative of the speaker’s family history, particularly focusing on the experiences of their grandmother and her half-brother, who immigrated from Ukraine to Canada and later to Israel, respectively. It illustrates the emotional bonds and sacrifices made by families during migration, as well as the disparity in life experiences before and after migration.

The speaker recounts their first visit to Israel as a teenager, where they met their uncle (the grandmother's half-brother) and observed the contrasting perspectives on migration. Despite facing hardships in their new environment, the family expressed no regrets about their decision to migrate, primarily for the prospects of their children and grandchildren.

This video narrative sets the backdrop for a broader study on the fertility rates among different migrant cohorts from the former Soviet Union to Israel. The study aims to analyze how early and late movers differ in terms of fertility, driven by economic factors and the quality of life in their new environments. It suggests that those who migrated earlier, facing higher costs and barriers, may be more motivated to invest in their families' futures than later migrants, which reflects intergenerational altruism.

The speaker connects this anecdote to research findings, revealing significant differences in fertility between early and late movers. The early movers exhibited higher fertility rates, and two-thirds of this difference was attributed to selection, with the remaining third related to the supportive environment in Israel. The discussion concludes with thoughts on the implications of these findings for policy, particularly in the context of declining fertility in Western countries and the potential costs associated with incentivizing childbearing.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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This is a family story,

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and it really, I think illustrates

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what we were after in this paper.

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So when I was a teenager, I went to Israel,

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for the first time by myself.

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I'd grown up in Canada. And the reason that I,

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I grew up in Canada was that my grandmother,

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who was born in the Ukraine,

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left there when she was a teenager.

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Now, before she left, she had been effectively the mother

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of her half brother in a little village, outside the,

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and the reason she had been the half the,

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the effectively the mother was that

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after my grandmother's mother died, my great-grandfather,

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her father remarried.

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Then it had two more, two more children, I believe.

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And then, and then she died.

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And so the, the, the younger siblings,

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it needed somebody.

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And so that was my grandmother's job

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until she was a teenager when, she was maybe 14 or 15

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or 16, we're not quite sure.

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Um, she had the opportunity to immigrate to Canada with her,

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her actually her uncle on her mother's side.

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Her father said, I hate to lose you,

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but this is a great opportunity.

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You should leave. And that's what she did.

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She never saw the rest of that family again.

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And so these two strands of the fa

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and then her half brother who remembered her

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with tremendous fondness then, you know, went

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through all the, all the horrible things,

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did narrowly escaped all the horrible things

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that could happen to a Jew.

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Um, in the Ukraine. They survived the first World War.

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They survived the Second World War by outrunning the Nazis

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and fleeing to the Soviet Union.

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He had married by then.

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He had his first child in Georgia,

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and then he returned to the Ukraine

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after the war, had two more children.

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And then in the early seventies, they all moved to Israel.

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In the interim, he corresponded

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with my grandmother the whole time she was in Toronto.

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And, they corresponded and remained very close.

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And then she passed away, just about a year after he

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and his family immigrated to Israel.

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So in the summer of 1976, we're all sitting in what,

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what Israel still calls development towns a little

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town at the edge of the desert.

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And, and everybody kind of has arrived.

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He and his wife, he's now in his late sixties, I think he

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and his wife and, two of their children

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that they had come with, of the three that that that came

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to, and two grandchildren were in

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this kind of extended family.

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And, you know, were catching up

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and they're telling me stories and it's a little difficult

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to communicate 'cause

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their Hebrew's not their first language and not mine either.

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And Yiddish is really their first language,

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but my Yiddish is very weak.

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But basically they're telling me about all the,

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all the glories of the place they came from, which,

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because they had lived most of their lives

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after the war in Kiev.

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And they said, Kiev has libraries and we're well educated,

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and Kiev has parks and a river.

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And they went on and on about Kiev, Kiev, Kiev.

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And we're sitting in this dusty dust, dusty little park,

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and it's like over 90 degrees Fahrenheit

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and the grass is wilting.

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And, I kind of look at 'em

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and say, uncle, you have regrets about migrating,

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which they, and they'd only

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arrived a couple of years earlier.

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And one of the other grandchild had already

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undergone a hostage taking, he had actually in the so,

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and which,

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which would affect his emotional health for the rest of his life.

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And so I asked him, you know, that they'd gone through a lot

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and they were living in this tiny little apartment.

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And I said, so uncle,

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you have regrets about this decision to migrate.

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And not that he answered,

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but two generations answered at the same time.

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They all said, no, we don't have any regrets.

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This is absolutely the right decision.

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And the reason is that

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that little toddler playing in the sand, there was a little,

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the little, the grandchild, maybe two

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or three years old, something like that.

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He's gonna grow up in the west

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and he's gonna be an engineer.

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And sure enough, this little boy, his name is Ika,

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did grow up in, in, in Be Shefa,

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which is a slightly bigger city in the south of Israel

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and would become an engineer.

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And then at that, that always,

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that story always stuck with me.

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'cause I thought, huh, these were relatively special people

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and they, in the tradition of my grandmother

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or my grandmother's father, my great-grandfather said,

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you should move because it's best thing for you.

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So, I mean, there was this, so I, so I thought, gee,

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maybe there's some altruism in this family

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where they're really looking out

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for their kids and their grandchildren.

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So I kind of liked that story about my family. Yeah.

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And then many years later, I realized

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that there might be data available with which

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to check this story because,

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and that's, that's kind of the, the context

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for this study.

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So, why don't you ask, and I'll answer.

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Many years later, when I was an assistant professor at

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Boston University, I had a student, so ov who,

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would eventually become a co-author

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who was himself a Russian an an immigrant from Russia.

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And I said to him, Hey, so we have these data,

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maybe we can do something with them.

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Because what's happened here is there are two cohorts

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of migration to, from Russia, from,

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from the, from the Soviet Union, and then from Russia

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after, after the end of the Soviet Union,

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after the Soviet Union collapses, there's kind of the,

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before 1989 folks, and there's the,

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The before 1989 folks, I understand very well

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because they're like my uncle and his, my great uncle

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and his family, they moved when

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migration costs were very high.

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You, you, you had to, you went, once you signed up to,

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to want to leave the country under the Soviet system,

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you probably lost your job.

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You were gonna surrender all of your property and,

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and then you're gonna wait, who knows how long,

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maybe a year, maybe two, until you got permission to leave.

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And then when you got the permission, then then,

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then you would, you, and then you had to go to Israel.

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You couldn't come to the United States.

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Um, that was kind of what that cohort faced

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after the Soviet Union collapses.

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Part of the deal is that, Russian Jews

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and Jews, for all the former Soviet notebooks,

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they were Ukrainian were allowed to leave,

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without cost.

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They could take their, much of their property with them.

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It was still costly. They were switching languages.

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They had to switch jobs.

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They, their occupations might not fit.

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But that was a, that both cohorts faced that.

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But the early cohort had faced much higher costs.

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And so I thought back to the story, you know, from this,

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very hot afternoon in a park in the desert,

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and said, huh, maybe these immigrants are,

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the early migrants are more strongly selected on

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how much they wanna invest in their grandchildren

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or their children than the later cohort.

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Okay? Now, not everybody,

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not all Jews leave the former Soviet Union,

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but by the time the 1990s are over

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and the majority have left,

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and you think, okay, well we can, we can,

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we can compare the early movers to the late movers.

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And that'll be interesting

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because we've suspected

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that migrants are self-selected on a lot of things,

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but we've never had a chance

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to really check if they're self-selected on

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eventual fertility.

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And that's kind of interesting

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because if you think about the west as it is now, people

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that live in Europe, where most of the North Americans

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and the, the, the, the white population

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of the Americas come from white, very broadly defined,

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in come from places who have

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below replacement fertility now, like where you live, right?

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But actually are, have much higher fertility in the,

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in the country of arrival.

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And we don't know whether that's

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because, the Americas are, have more space

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and kind of the, the cost of having children is lower,

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or whether that those cohorts of migrants,

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we're self-selected on, on higher fertility,

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which might be related to

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how much you care about your

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children and your grandchildren.

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When we say altruism, what, what we mean

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as economists in this case is intergenerational

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altruism, right?

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So every family has these, has has a, has a, has these, gets

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to make decisions about how much of the resources to pet

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to spend on the parents' generation

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and how much to spend on the children's generation.

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And usually we think of that as the feeding the children,

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the health of the children, and mostly the education

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of the children in present cohorts.

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But if you're thinking about intergenerational,

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which generation you choose to invest in, migration

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must be one of those, must be one of those questions, right?

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Because the cohort that moves, like my uncle

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and his children are going to have to change languages

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and change jobs and leave lots of people

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that they love, right?

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And start over in this new place.

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Um, whereas the, for the children

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or the grand for the grandchildren, the ones who grow up

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or are born or grow up in the new place,

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it's all gonna be much, much easier.

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And this is kind of a story of in, I'm a very,

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I come from a very immigrant family.

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So, but this is a it with among families that immigrate,

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this is a very familiar story, right?

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The grandchildren who were born in the new place,

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speak the language fluently and understand the culture

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and and have trouble even communicating sometimes

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with their parents

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and their grandparents who made the investment

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that caused this whole thing to happen.

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So, and now, so where's the literature on that?

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Well, the literature says that the, the,

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the migrants tend to be higher education.

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So they tend to be moving to good, better jobs

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that have a high return from two migration for the,

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for the generation that moves.

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But nobody had really looked at whether there was selection

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in the treatment of the children in this decision that,

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that literature is, is relatively sparse

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because there were, there, there are very few

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unusual circumstances like this where part

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of a cohort moves early

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and the other part of the cohort moves, moves later so

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that you can separate the treatment effect.

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That is to say the effect of moving to a place

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where children are cheaper and from the selection effect,

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who decides to move early and who decides to move late.

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The beautiful data thing is that the early cohort, so that

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so many Jews from this form of Soviet Union

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arrive in Israel by the time the nineties are finished,

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this is a number like 800, 900,000.

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And so, you've got very big, very big samples

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of early movers and late movers all in the Israeli labor

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force surveys, which is the Israeli equivalent

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of the current population survey.

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It's the thing that's done once a month.

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So we can check the unemployment rate

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and then the economists

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and other social scientists, free ride on that data set

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to do all the other lovely stuff that we like to do.

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And so we had big cohorts of data.

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Now it wasn't totally straightforward

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because some of those, so includes women who have not

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yet completed their fertility,

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who are still maybe in their

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thirties or in their early forties.

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And we can't yet predict how many children they,

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we don't know, we haven't, can't observe

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how many children they're going to have.

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And so we built a prediction model, which turned out to be,

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to work quite well to kind of predict the number of children

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that a woman in her thirties might have, especially

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during their, for the, for the later moving cohort.

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But we had women who, moved

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before their, their childbearing years

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and during their childbearing years.

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And so we could observe eventual fertility,

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lifetime fertility for most of them,

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and for some of them we would,

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we would predict lifetime fertility.

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And that's kind of the data set up.

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But it's basically early movers, late movers.

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And then you've got, the,

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cohorts that were in had what, what we would call

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a longer treatment exposure, more time in Israel

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and those that had a shorter treatment exposure.

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So, and for,

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but what was important to us is that exposure to treatment

13:27.035 --> 13:28.905
overlapped for some of them completely

13:28.905 --> 13:29.985
with their childbearing years,

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and for some of them only partially.

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And so that, that way we could back out

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and separate the selection effect from the treatment effect.

13:41.095 --> 13:43.735
Brilliant. What we, what we do for, say immigrants from

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the UK to Canada,

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what we found was a very big difference in fertility

13:49.215 --> 13:50.935
between the early movers and the late movers.

13:52.075 --> 13:57.005
It's, it's in the, or it's around, 0.9 children

13:57.145 --> 14:00.415
or 0.8 children, which remember, yeah,

14:00.515 --> 14:03.895
modern fertility studies are all about, you know,

14:03.895 --> 14:05.495
whether you're just above replacement

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or just below replacement, your country is below replacement

14:10.275 --> 14:13.095
by, I think maybe 0.4 or something like that.

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Canada is just a little below replacement.

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Mexico's just a little above.

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And that has huge implications even in the long run.

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So, so a difference between the cohorts of 0.8

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or maybe even 0.9 is huge

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in modern fertility studies.

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What we found was that about two thirds of that was due

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to selection, which is a totally new finding.

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And the other third is probably due to treatment, due

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to the idea that the apartments are bigger

14:44.365 --> 14:47.505
and the, the social service or,

14:47.525 --> 14:48.985
or whatever it is about Israel

14:48.985 --> 14:50.505
that makes it a child friendly place.

14:51.265 --> 14:54.565
Um, bigger apartments, better supportive families.

14:54.705 --> 14:56.965
Israel also has a very generous child alignment system

14:58.105 --> 15:00.085
that's, that transfers money

15:00.105 --> 15:02.165
to families based on the number of children they have.

15:02.665 --> 15:05.965
All of those things together account for maybe a third of

15:05.965 --> 15:08.925
that effect, but two thirds of it seems to come becoming

15:09.755 --> 15:12.045
from selection, which was a totally new finding.

15:12.545 --> 15:14.045
And lemme just start with the,

15:14.195 --> 15:16.485
with the policy implications if I may,

15:16.485 --> 15:20.565
because you know, once people start thinking about

15:21.235 --> 15:23.165
fertility below replacement levels,

15:24.195 --> 15:25.965
they start going maybe a little nuts.

15:25.965 --> 15:28.325
So about different ways government starts saying,

15:28.445 --> 15:29.885
we're gonna run outta people, what are we gonna do?

15:30.345 --> 15:33.725
And they, they start, you know, they come up with all kinds

15:33.725 --> 15:37.525
of great ideas for increasing

15:38.265 --> 15:40.725
the fertility of, of women

15:41.665 --> 15:44.845
and none of them work, right?

15:46.135 --> 15:49.075
And so, it,

15:49.615 --> 15:51.595
and so this really is kind of an,

15:51.995 --> 15:54.195
a relatively important policy question.

15:54.745 --> 15:58.635
What you can learn from the treatment effect is that a place

15:58.635 --> 16:00.795
that is relatively children friendly,

16:01.525 --> 16:03.355
which is fairly expensive, right?

16:04.385 --> 16:07.805
Um, you have to make fairly large transfers

16:08.225 --> 16:10.725
to a western population if you want

16:10.745 --> 16:14.125
to make it cost effective to have a child.

16:14.145 --> 16:15.365
And I, I, I don't want to,

16:15.525 --> 16:17.045
I don't wanna say this in the best possible way,

16:17.675 --> 16:20.045
what we know in the background, kind of going back

16:20.045 --> 16:23.005
to the literature is backer's quality quantity model.

16:23.465 --> 16:25.685
One of the reasons he won the Nobel Prize was

16:25.685 --> 16:30.585
for pointing out that these investments in children are,

16:31.005 --> 16:35.705
are coming, are, are, are, are generating

16:36.415 --> 16:37.505
smaller families.

16:38.305 --> 16:41.315
Usually when you invest in education, you typically

16:41.875 --> 16:43.275
generate smaller families,

16:43.855 --> 16:45.635
but they've got, there's a lot more human

16:45.635 --> 16:46.915
capital in in each kid.

16:49.685 --> 16:50.785
And so,

16:50.965 --> 16:52.385
and so what, you know, the,

16:52.485 --> 16:55.305
the big pattern in fertility transitions as,

16:55.725 --> 16:57.745
as economists understand it, is

16:57.745 --> 17:00.465
that when women become more highly educated,

17:00.465 --> 17:03.465
the opportunity cost of having children rises.

17:04.365 --> 17:08.745
And so what they do, these women who have more income moms

17:08.745 --> 17:10.385
who have more income, tend

17:10.385 --> 17:12.825
to have smaller families in which is there are a lot more

17:13.025 --> 17:15.705
resources invested in each child in a developing country.

17:15.765 --> 17:17.945
For context that would be more food

17:18.405 --> 17:21.665
and more health in a developed country,

17:21.805 --> 17:23.785
in a western first world context,

17:24.255 --> 17:26.545
that would be a lot more education per camp.

17:28.205 --> 17:32.625
And so, you know, governments trying to, to, to fight

17:32.655 --> 17:35.225
that trend have come up with all kinds of great ideas.

17:36.125 --> 17:37.385
Um, but,

17:37.645 --> 17:40.185
but the ones that work are very, very expensive.

17:41.255 --> 17:44.235
And what we've pointed out is that, you know, on top

17:44.235 --> 17:47.075
of everything else, if you are in a, in a country

17:47.145 --> 17:48.555
that has exported,

17:49.505 --> 17:52.715
that has net exported people, right?

17:53.295 --> 17:55.635
As Europe has to the new world,

17:56.175 --> 17:59.195
and Israel's very unusual for kind of being part of the,

17:59.655 --> 18:00.875
the old world, if you will,

18:01.295 --> 18:04.915
but being a net importer of, of people for,

18:05.175 --> 18:10.055
for the geopolitical reasons, if you're a country like

18:10.055 --> 18:12.135
that, you can make these investments

18:12.135 --> 18:15.615
that will be fertility increasing, but they're, but they're,

18:15.615 --> 18:16.735
but they're, they're expensive.

00:00 - This is a family story, and it really, I think illustrates what we were after in this paper. So when I was a teenager, I went to Israel, for the first time by myself. I'd grown up in Canada. And the reason that I,

00:15 - I grew up in Canada was that my grandmother, who was born in the Ukraine, left there when she was a teenager. Now, before she left, she had been effectively the mother of her half brother in a little village, outside the, and the reason she had been the half the, the effectively the mother was that after my grandmother's mother died, my great-grandfather, her father remarried. Then it had two more, two more children, I believe.

00:49 - And then, and then she died. And so the, the, the younger siblings, it needed somebody. And so that was my grandmother's job until she was a teenager when, she was maybe 14 or 15 or 16, we're not quite sure. she had the opportunity to immigrate to Canada with her, her actually her uncle on her mother's side. Her father said, I hate to lose you, but this is a great opportunity.

01:20 - You should leave. And that's what she did. She never saw the rest of that family again. And so these two strands of the fa and then her half brother who remembered her with tremendous fondness then, you know, went through all the, all the horrible things, did narrowly escaped all the horrible things that could happen to a Jew. in the Ukraine. They survived the first World War. They survived the Second World War by outrunning the Nazis

01:47 - and fleeing to the Soviet Union. He had married by then. He had his first child in Georgia, and then he returned to the Ukraine after the war, had two more children. And then in the early seventies, they all moved to Israel. In the interim, he corresponded with my grandmother the whole time she was in Toronto. And, they corresponded and remained very close. And then she passed away, just about a year after he

02:11 - and his family immigrated to Israel. So in the summer of 1976, we're all sitting in what, what Israel still calls development towns a little town at the edge of the desert. And, and everybody kind of has arrived. He and his wife, he's now in his late sixties, I think he and his wife and, two of their children that they had come with, of the three that that that came to, and two grandchildren were in this kind of extended family.

02:43 - And, you know, were catching up and they're telling me stories and it's a little difficult to communicate 'cause their Hebrew's not their first language and not mine either. And Yiddish is really their first language, but my Yiddish is very weak. But basically they're telling me about all the, all the glories of the place they came from, which, because they had lived most of their lives after the war in Kiev.

03:05 - And they said, Kiev has libraries and we're well educated, and Kiev has parks and a river. And they went on and on about Kiev, Kiev, Kiev. And we're sitting in this dusty dust, dusty little park, and it's like over 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the grass is wilting. And, I kind of look at 'em and say, uncle, you have regrets about migrating, which they, and they'd only arrived a couple of years earlier.

03:32 - And one of the other grandchild had already undergone a hostage taking, he had actually in the so, and which, which would affect his emotional health for the rest of his life. And so I asked him, you know, that they'd gone through a lot and they were living in this tiny little apartment. And I said, so uncle, you have regrets about this decision to migrate. And not that he answered, but two generations answered at the same time.

04:01 - They all said, no, we don't have any regrets. This is absolutely the right decision. And the reason is that that little toddler playing in the sand, there was a little, the little, the grandchild, maybe two or three years old, something like that. He's gonna grow up in the west and he's gonna be an engineer. And sure enough, this little boy, his name is Ika, did grow up in, in, in Be Shefa,

04:26 - which is a slightly bigger city in the south of Israel and would become an engineer. And then at that, that always, that story always stuck with me. 'cause I thought, huh, these were relatively special people and they, in the tradition of my grandmother or my grandmother's father, my great-grandfather said, you should move because it's best thing for you. So, I mean, there was this, so I, so I thought, gee, maybe there's some altruism in this family

04:56 - where they're really looking out for their kids and their grandchildren. So I kind of liked that story about my family. Yeah. And then many years later, I realized that there might be data available with which to check this story because, and that's, that's kind of the, the context for this study. So, why don't you ask, and I'll answer. Many years later, when I was an assistant professor at

05:20 - Boston University, I had a student, so ov who, would eventually become a co-author who was himself a Russian an an immigrant from Russia. And I said to him, Hey, so we have these data, maybe we can do something with them. Because what's happened here is there are two cohorts of migration to, from Russia, from, from the, from the Soviet Union, and then from Russia after, after the end of the Soviet Union, after the Soviet Union collapses, there's kind of the,

05:53 - before 1989 folks, and there's the, The before 1989 folks, I understand very well because they're like my uncle and his, my great uncle and his family, they moved when migration costs were very high. You, you, you had to, you went, once you signed up to, to want to leave the country under the Soviet system, you probably lost your job. You were gonna surrender all of your property and, and then you're gonna wait, who knows how long,

06:22 - maybe a year, maybe two, until you got permission to leave. And then when you got the permission, then then, then you would, you, and then you had to go to Israel. You couldn't come to the United States. that was kind of what that cohort faced after the Soviet Union collapses. Part of the deal is that, Russian Jews and Jews, for all the former Soviet notebooks, they were Ukrainian were allowed to leave, without cost.

06:53 - They could take their, much of their property with them. It was still costly. They were switching languages. They had to switch jobs. They, their occupations might not fit. But that was a, that both cohorts faced that. But the early cohort had faced much higher costs. And so I thought back to the story, you know, from this, very hot afternoon in a park in the desert, and said, huh, maybe these immigrants are, the early migrants are more strongly selected on

07:24 - how much they wanna invest in their grandchildren or their children than the later cohort. Okay? Now, not everybody, not all Jews leave the former Soviet Union, but by the time the 1990s are over and the majority have left, and you think, okay, well we can, we can, we can compare the early movers to the late movers. And that'll be interesting because we've suspected

07:52 - that migrants are self-selected on a lot of things, but we've never had a chance to really check if they're self-selected on eventual fertility. And that's kind of interesting because if you think about the west as it is now, people that live in Europe, where most of the North Americans and the, the, the, the white population of the Americas come from white, very broadly defined, in come from places who have

08:23 - below replacement fertility now, like where you live, right? But actually are, have much higher fertility in the, in the country of arrival. And we don't know whether that's because, the Americas are, have more space and kind of the, the cost of having children is lower, or whether that those cohorts of migrants, we're self-selected on, on higher fertility, which might be related to how much you care about your

08:56 - children and your grandchildren. When we say altruism, what, what we mean as economists in this case is intergenerational altruism, right? So every family has these, has has a, has a, has these, gets to make decisions about how much of the resources to pet to spend on the parents' generation and how much to spend on the children's generation. And usually we think of that as the feeding the children, the health of the children, and mostly the education

09:26 - of the children in present cohorts. But if you're thinking about intergenerational, which generation you choose to invest in, migration must be one of those, must be one of those questions, right? Because the cohort that moves, like my uncle and his children are going to have to change languages and change jobs and leave lots of people that they love, right? And start over in this new place. whereas the, for the children

09:56 - or the grand for the grandchildren, the ones who grow up or are born or grow up in the new place, it's all gonna be much, much easier. And this is kind of a story of in, I'm a very, I come from a very immigrant family. So, but this is a it with among families that immigrate, this is a very familiar story, right? The grandchildren who were born in the new place, speak the language fluently and understand the culture and and have trouble even communicating sometimes

10:25 - with their parents and their grandparents who made the investment that caused this whole thing to happen. So, and now, so where's the literature on that? Well, the literature says that the, the, the migrants tend to be higher education. So they tend to be moving to good, better jobs that have a high return from two migration for the, for the generation that moves. But nobody had really looked at whether there was selection

10:59 - in the treatment of the children in this decision that, that literature is, is relatively sparse because there were, there, there are very few unusual circumstances like this where part of a cohort moves early and the other part of the cohort moves, moves later so that you can separate the treatment effect. That is to say the effect of moving to a place where children are cheaper and from the selection effect, who decides to move early and who decides to move late.

11:29 - The beautiful data thing is that the early cohort, so that so many Jews from this form of Soviet Union arrive in Israel by the time the nineties are finished, this is a number like 800, 900,000. And so, you've got very big, very big samples of early movers and late movers all in the Israeli labor force surveys, which is the Israeli equivalent of the current population survey. It's the thing that's done once a month. So we can check the unemployment rate

12:02 - and then the economists and other social scientists, free ride on that data set to do all the other lovely stuff that we like to do. And so we had big cohorts of data. Now it wasn't totally straightforward because some of those, so includes women who have not yet completed their fertility, who are still maybe in their thirties or in their early forties. And we can't yet predict how many children they,

12:26 - we don't know, we haven't, can't observe how many children they're going to have. And so we built a prediction model, which turned out to be, to work quite well to kind of predict the number of children that a woman in her thirties might have, especially during their, for the, for the later moving cohort. But we had women who, moved before their, their childbearing years and during their childbearing years. And so we could observe eventual fertility,

12:59 - lifetime fertility for most of them, and for some of them we would, we would predict lifetime fertility. And that's kind of the data set up. But it's basically early movers, late movers. And then you've got, the, cohorts that were in had what, what we would call a longer treatment exposure, more time in Israel and those that had a shorter treatment exposure. So, and for,

13:23 - but what was important to us is that exposure to treatment overlapped for some of them completely with their childbearing years, and for some of them only partially. And so that, that way we could back out and separate the selection effect from the treatment effect. Brilliant. What we, what we do for, say immigrants from the UK to Canada, what we found was a very big difference in fertility between the early movers and the late movers.

13:52 - It's, it's in the, or it's around, 0.9 children or 0.8 children, which remember, yeah, modern fertility studies are all about, you know, whether you're just above replacement or just below replacement, your country is below replacement by, I think maybe 0.4 or something like that. Canada is just a little below replacement. Mexico's just a little above. And that has huge implications even in the long run. So, so a difference between the cohorts of 0.8

14:26 - or maybe even 0.9 is huge in modern fertility studies. What we found was that about two thirds of that was due to selection, which is a totally new finding. And the other third is probably due to treatment, due to the idea that the apartments are bigger and the, the social service or, or whatever it is about Israel that makes it a child friendly place. bigger apartments, better supportive families.

14:54 - Israel also has a very generous child alignment system that's, that transfers money to families based on the number of children they have. All of those things together account for maybe a third of that effect, but two thirds of it seems to come becoming from selection, which was a totally new finding. And lemme just start with the, with the policy implications if I may, because you know, once people start thinking about fertility below replacement levels,

15:24 - they start going maybe a little nuts. So about different ways government starts saying, we're gonna run outta people, what are we gonna do? And they, they start, you know, they come up with all kinds of great ideas for increasing the fertility of, of women and none of them work, right? And so, it, and so this really is kind of an, a relatively important policy question.

15:54 - What you can learn from the treatment effect is that a place that is relatively children friendly, which is fairly expensive, right? you have to make fairly large transfers to a western population if you want to make it cost effective to have a child. And I, I, I don't want to, I don't wanna say this in the best possible way, what we know in the background, kind of going back to the literature is backer's quality quantity model.

16:23 - One of the reasons he won the Nobel Prize was for pointing out that these investments in children are, are coming, are, are, are, are generating smaller families. Usually when you invest in education, you typically generate smaller families, but they've got, there's a lot more human capital in in each kid. And so, and so what, you know, the,

16:52 - the big pattern in fertility transitions as, as economists understand it, is that when women become more highly educated, the opportunity cost of having children rises. And so what they do, these women who have more income moms who have more income, tend to have smaller families in which is there are a lot more resources invested in each child in a developing country. For context that would be more food and more health in a developed country,

17:21 - in a western first world context, that would be a lot more education per camp. And so, you know, governments trying to, to, to fight that trend have come up with all kinds of great ideas. but, but the ones that work are very, very expensive. And what we've pointed out is that, you know, on top of everything else, if you are in a, in a country that has exported, that has net exported people, right?

17:53 - As Europe has to the new world, and Israel's very unusual for kind of being part of the, the old world, if you will, but being a net importer of, of people for, for the geopolitical reasons, if you're a country like that, you can make these investments that will be fertility increasing, but they're, but they're, but they're, they're expensive.

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