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More Births@MoreBirths · Feb 24, 2026

A recent study found that giving men a pay raise led them to have more children, while giving women a pay raise led…

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Summary

A study found that pay raises have opposite effects on fertility for men and women: raises led men to have more children but women to have fewer, likely because women face greater opportunity costs between work and childcare. The findings suggest policies addressing wage gaps may inadvertently reduce fertility rates among women.

Summarized by ThreadOut AI from the full thread. May miss nuance — read the thread below.

  1. #1

    A recent study found that giving men a pay raise led them to have more children, while giving women a pay raise led them to have fewer children. 🧵.

  2. #2

    For women, the effect of a pay raise was significantly reduced future fertility. A pay increase at 25 was associated with a large decrease in fertility at age 30, regardless of the skill level. For men, a pay increase was associated with persistently higher fertility. 2/4

  3. #3

    Why? The authors argue that "the substitution effect between children and labor supply is dominating for women while the income effect is dominating for men." Since childcare falls more on women, the competition between work and family is greater for women than for men. 3/4

  4. #4

    Policies which set out to combat pay disparities between men and women may therefore be inadvertently pushing fertility downward. 4/4 Link to the paper here: chicagofed.org/publications/w…

  5. #5

    Given the attention on this article, there is a lot of nuance that my short thread didn't capture. Here is deep dive talking about both similar findings and challenges to the paper by the brilliant demographer @lymanstoneky: lymanstone.substack.com/p/can-you-rais…