Do Highly Educated Women Choose Smaller Families?

We present evidence that the cross‐sectional relationship between fertility and women's education in the US has recently become U‐shaped. The number of hours women work has concurrently increased with their education. In our model, raising children and homemaking require parents’ time, which could be substituted by services such as childcare and housekeeping. By substituting their own time for market services to raise children and run their households, highly educated women are able to have more children and work longer hours. We find that the change in the relative cost of childcare accounts for the emergence of this new pattern.