The Empathy Channel in Fertility Decisions (opens in new tab)

In the last few days, a number of papers have been cited in the social media claiming to find a positive “contagion” effect in fertility. The basic finding is simple: affective exposure to a newborn — a sibling’s baby, a close friend’s child, sometimes even a colleague’s — increases the probability that an individual will have a child within a biologically coherent time window afterward. The timing matters. The rise in hazard rates typically occurs within one to three years of the exposure, w...