Parental Education and Fertility: An Empirical Investigation Based on Evidence from Taiwan

This paper investigated the size of the impact of parental education on fertility choice and whether this effect was larger for maternal education. This paper utilized the substantial expansion of educational opportunities in Taiwan and thus applied the two-stage least-square method to account for the endogeneity of educational attainment. The results showed that parental education was an important factor in reducing the fertility rate. In addition, maternal education was a stronger determinant than paternal education.