To better understand the forces underlying fertility decisions, we look at the forerunners of fertility decline. In Rouen, France, completed fertility dropped between 1640 and 1792 from 7.4 to 4.2 children. We review possible explanations and keep only three: increases in materialism, in women’s empowerment, and in returns to education. The methodology is one of analytic narrative, bringing together descriptive evidence with a theoretical model. We accordingly propose a theory showing that we can discriminate between these explanations by looking at childlessness and its social gradient. An increase in materialism or, under certain conditions, in women’s empowerment, leads to an increase in childlessness, while an increase in the return to education leads to a decrease in childlessness. Looking at the Rouen data, childlessness was clearly on the rise, from 4% in 1640 to 10% at the end of the eighteenth century, which appears to discredit the explanation based on increasing returns to education, at least for this period.

中文翻译：

---

生育率下降的关键力量：工业革命之前鲁昂的无子女经验

为了更好地理解决定生育力的力量，我们看一下生育率下降的先驱。在法国鲁昂，完整的生育率在1640年至1792年之间从7.4名儿童下降到4.2名儿童。我们回顾了可能的解释，仅保留三种：唯物主义，增强妇女权能和获得教育回报。方法论是一种分析叙事，将描述性证据与理论模型结合在一起。因此，我们提出了一种理论，表明我们可以通过观察无子女及其社会梯度来区分这些解释。唯物主义的增加或在一定条件下妇女赋权的增加导致无子女的增加，而受教育的回报增加则导致无子女的减少。看一下鲁昂的数据，