Childlessness and Development

This paper leverages harmonized micro-data consisting of 82 million females from 164 household surveys covering 72 unique countries from all income levels to investigate the relationship between childlessness and development. Empirically, I find that childlessness rates display a U-shaped pattern with development at country, subgroups and individual levels, which contribute to 1/3 of heterogeneity of aggregate fertility across countries. Moreover, females in richer countries and those are more educated delay their fertility, suggested by the life- cycle childlessness rates. Combining these novel empirical findings, I construct a two-period model under a parsimonious set of assumptions to speak to the empirical finding: when the wage growth effect dominates the wage level effect, females choose to delay fertility; childlessness is driven by natural sterilization and different preference for number of children.