From: K.C., Binita <Binita.KC@oeaw.ac.at>
Sent: Tuesday, September 16, 2025 12:25 PM
Subject: Reminder: WIC- Colloquium - Wednesday, 17 September 2025 - Lawrence L. WU - The Effect of the Great Recession on U.S. Fertility: Causal Estimates from a Novel Cohort Discontinuity Design

Dear WIC colleagues,

Just a gentle reminder about tomorrow’s colloquium:

Wednesday, 17 September 2025

11:00 - 12:00 (CEST)                                                                                             

Location:

Meeting Room 1, 3rd floor, PSK, Georg Coch Platz 2, 1010 Vienna.

Please register here.

The Effect of the Great Recession on U.S. Fertility: Causal Estimates from a Novel Cohort Discontinuity Design

Lawrence L. WU,
New York University

Abstract:

We employ a novel cohort discontinuity design to identify the causal effect of the Great Recession on the fertility of single-year cohorts of U.S. women. This design uses the exogenous shock of the Great Recession and demographic projection methods to identify causal effects that are cohort specific. Effects were negative across cohorts and varied considerably for white and black women. Declines were most pronounced for cohorts in their teens and 20s during the Great Recession, with relative declines of 7--30% and absolute declines of 0.013--0.031 births per woman. In a final set of analyses, we followed cohorts forward in time to assess their cumulative fertility as observed in 2022 and as projected to 2037. These analyses suggest that were the Great Recession to have a permanent quantum effect, lifetime fertility will nevertheless be likely to remain at or near replacement for those who experienced the sharpest fertility declines during the Great Recession.

About the presenter:

Lawrence L. Wu is Professor of Sociology and Director of the NYU Population Center at New York University. Prior to NYU, he was a faculty member at Princeton and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has held visiting positions at Columbia and Yale. He is a social and family demographer whose research areas include fertility, family structure and family change, cohabitation and marriage, marital and union dissolution, causal inference, and event history methods. His research has received funding from NIA, NICHD, NSF, ASPE, and the William T. Grant Foundation.

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PLEASE SEE https://www.oeaw.ac.at/vid/events/wic-colloquium FOR OUR UPCOMING AND PREVIOUS COLLOQUIA

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