It is well known that fertility rates have fallen to historically low levels across high-income countries. Data from the United Nations (2024) show that from 1960 to 2023, the total fertility rate – a measure that captures the average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime, assuming current age-specific fertility rates – among OECD countries fell from 3.29 children per woman to 1.54 (Bloom et al. 2024). The fact that all OECD countries other than Israel now have a total fertility rate below 2 has rightly captured the attention of scholars, policymakers, and the public. Fertility rates this low imply that countries are on track for slower population growth, substantial population ageing, eventual population decline, and a host of associated social, fiscal, and economic challenges.

Low and declining fertility rates in high-income, modern societies are not readily explained with traditional economic models. Doepke et al. (2022) note that the first-generation economic models of fertility choice starting with Becker (1960) emphasised two central ideas – a quality/quantity trade-off in the demand for children and the opportunity cost of women’s time. These concepts helped explain why, in earlier periods of demographic transition, families had fewer children in richer societies (because they invested more in each child) and why fertility was lower in societies with higher female labour force participation (because the opportunity cost of women’s time was greater). But as Doepke et al. observe, neither of those aggregate relationships holds across high-income countries today, and new approaches are needed to explain recent trends.

In recent research (Kearney and Levine 2025), we propose that recent fertility declines in high-income countries reflect cohort-level shifts in decisions around family formation shaped by evolving social norms, widespread social and economic influences, and expanding lifestyle options. The dominant story is not one of annual fertility rates responding to period-specific economic or policy shocks. This perspective complements and embeds prior VoxEU discussions on fertility that have emphasised the role of workplace frictions (Bover et al. 2025), parental leave policies (Yum and Kim 2025), and housing (VanDoornik et al. 2025).

Changing fertility patterns across cohorts

We document how lifecycle fertility patterns have changed across recent cohorts of women in six high-income countries – Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the US – using data from the Human Fertility Database. We track the number of children ever born, the probability of being childless, and the conditional probability of having additional children among women who already have children by age, across five-year age birth cohorts of women born between 1975 and 1995.

Across these recent cohorts of childbearing-age women, women are more likely to be childless at all ages observed. Figure 1 shows increasing shares of women remaining childless at all observed ages across successive cohorts of women across the high-income countries. Conditional on having a certain number of children at a given age, there is little change in the conditional probability of having a subsequent birth.

Figure 1 Rising childlessness across recent cohorts of women

Source: Reproduced from Kearney and Levine (2025). Authors’ calculations based on data from country-specific age-specific fertility rates available from the Human Fertility Database (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research [Germany] and Vienna Institute of Demography [Austria], available at www.humanfertility.org (data downloaded 15 April 2025).

The key insight is that declining fertility largely reflects delayed or foregone entry into parenthood.
This implies that we should be asking why young adults today are more likely to delay or avoid parenthood as compared to young adults in the recent past. Of note, similar patterns exist in cohort rates of marriage among recent cohorts of young adults, suggesting that the decline in fertility is part of a broader shift away from family formation. The fact that these cohort trends appear across countries with very different policy environments suggests that widespread social and cultural forces are at work.

Explaining cohort shifts in fertility

To rationalise these cohort-level shifts, we extend a standard Becker-style model of fertility choice by explicitly introducing cohort-specific contextual factors. The extended model preserves the key economic mechanisms of income effects, price effects, and the opportunity cost of time, but embeds them in a broader framework where prevailing social norms and available consumption and lifestyle options evolve over time.

In this framework, fertility decisions depend not only on preferences and constraints but also on the range of socially accepted lifestyle and consumption options and on cohort-specific norms surrounding work, parenting, gender roles, and leisure. As options expand, childbearing becomes one choice among many, raising the relative value of non-family pursuits. At the same time, shifting norms – including more intensive parenting expectations, longer work hours, diverging gender-role attitudes between men and women, and greater peer engagement in adult-oriented activities – reduce the relative appeal of parenthood, leading many young adults to prioritise other activities even when underlying preferences for children remain unchanged.

Figure 2 illustrates these dynamics and the resulting general equilibrium feedback loop linking lifestyle and consumption opportunities, social and economic forces, and evolving norms. Compared with earlier generations, young adults now face expanded career opportunities, consumption- and experience-oriented lifestyles, digital leisure and social connection, travel, and wellness and self-development. As delaying or forgoing parenthood becomes increasingly socially accepted, and sometimes aspirational, the model predicts a reallocation of time and resources away from early family formation.

Figure 2 Pathways to a social equilibrium of shifting priorities away from parenthood

Source: Kearney and Levine (2025).

Consistent with this view, existing evidence suggests a link between fertility decline in high-income countries and rising parenting intensity (e.g. Doepke and Zilibotti 2019), the prevalence of ‘greedy jobs’ (e.g. Goldin 2014), and growing divergence in gender-role attitudes between men and women (e.g. Briselli and González 2023). Evidence also shows that fertility is responsive to social and cultural influences from media and religious leaders (e.g. La Ferrara et al. 2012, Kearney and Levine 2015, Iyer et al. 2025).

Survey evidence is broadly consistent with this ‘shifting priorities’ narrative. For example, recent surveys show that far fewer adults rank marriage or parenthood as central to life fulfilment compared with career satisfaction or social relationships (Parker and Minkin 2023). Furthermore, survey data from various countries show that the decline in fertility is larger than the decline in reported ‘ideal’ fertility (see, for instance, OECD 2016 and Hartnett and Gemmill 2020). That is consistent with preferences for children per se not falling by as much as realised fertility.

Interpreting the cross-cohort fertility decline as not merely a response to prices or constraints but an equilibrium cultural adjustment helps to explain both its persistence and its social diffusion in advanced economies.

Implications for policy

This proposed emphasis on social norms and available consumption and lifestyle options as key drivers of the low-fertility paradigm in modern economies is consistent with evidence from causal studies showing that the impact of targeted policies and prices on fertility is, at most, small (see Stone 2020 and Bergsvik et al. 2021 for reviews of this evidence). Policies such as subsidised childcare, expanded child tax credits, or baby bonus payments can ease financial strain and improve various measures of family well-being, but incremental changes in these factors have not been associated with sustained large changes in fertility.

This implies that any intervention or change aimed at reversing the low-fertility paradigm would have to be much larger than the types of incremental pro-natalist policies tried to date. They would have to shape a young adult’s decision about a life path in the years and decades to come. Something that might affect one’s life for a year or two is unlikely to alter the appeal of a lifetime commitment to bring another human being into this world.

Are there any policy or economic changes that might meaningfully increase fertility? We speculatively conclude that though incremental changes in family-friendly work policies are unlikely to produce large effects, meaningfully addressing the multi-year conflict between work and parenting might affect the lifetime decisions of future generations. In a similar way, while modest reductions in housing costs are unlikely to have large effects on fertility rates, large expansions in access to home ownership might have meaningful effects (as in Dettling and Kearney 2025 and Van Doornik et al. 2025).

In general, the low-fertility paradigm in high-income countries today is unlikely to reverse without a dramatic reshaping of society such that parenthood becomes more compatible with a full and flourishing adult life, as modernly conceived. Such societal changes are unlikely to come from policy tweaks alone, but from more widespread cultural and institutional changes.

References

Becker, G S (1960), “An economic analysis of fertility”, NBER Chapters, 209–40.

Bergsvik, J, A Fauske, and R K Hart (2021), “Can policies stall the fertility fall? A systematic review of the (quasi-)experimental literature”, Population and Development Review 47(4): 913–64.

Bloom, D E, M Kuhn, and K Prettner (2024), “Confronting low fertility rates and population decline”, VoxEU.org, 12 August.

Bover, O, N Guner, Y Kulikova, A Ruggieri, and C Sanz (2025), “Firms, family-friendly policies, and fertility”, VoxEU.org, 26 July.

Briselli, G, and L González (2023), “Are men’s attitudes holding back fertility and women’s careers? Evidence from Europe”, unpublished manuscript.

Doepke, M, A Hannusch, F Kindermann, and M Tertilt (2022), “The economics of fertility: A new era”, NBER Working Paper 29948.

Doepke, M, and F Zilibotti (2019), Love, money, and parenting: How economics explains the way we raise our kids, Princeton University Press.

Goldin, C (2014), “A grand gender convergence: Its last chapter”, American Economic Review 104(4): 1091–119.

Hartnett, C S, and A Gemmill (2020), “Recent trends in US childbearing intentions”, Demography 57(6): 2035–45.

Iyer, L, P Lopez de Mesa Moyano, and V Moorthy (2025), “Religion and demography: Papal influences on fertility”, unpublished manuscript.

Kearney, M S, and P B Levine (2015), “Media influences on social outcomes: The impact of MTV’s 16 and Pregnant on teen childbearing”, American Economic Review 105(12): 3597–632.

Kearney, M S, and P B Levine (2025), “Why is fertility so low in high income countries?”, NBER Working Paper 33989 (revised January 2026).

La Ferrara, E, A Chong, and S Duryea (2012), “Soap operas and fertility: Evidence from Brazil”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 4(4): 1–31.

OECD (2016), “SF2.2: Ideal and actual number of children”, OECD – Social Policy Division – Directorate of Employment, Labour and Social Affairs.

Parker, K, and R Minkin (2023), “Public has mixed views on the modern American family”, Pew Research Center, 14 September.

Stone, L (2020), “Pro-natal policies work, but they come with a hefty price tag”, Institute for Family Studies, 5 March.

United Nations (2024), World population prospects 2024, online edition, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division.

Van Doornik, B, D Fazio, T Ramadorai, and J Skrastiņš (2025), “Housing and fertility”, VoxEU.org, 9 March.

Yum, M, and D Kim (2025), “The effects of parental leave policy reforms on fertility and gender gaps”, VoxEU.org, 17 March.