Pandemics and fertility: evidence from 1918

Nuffield Associate Member Felix Tropf, DPhil in Sociology Nicolò Cavalli and Fellow Melinda Mills co-write a paper with Sander Wagner that uses data from the United States during the 1918 influenza pandemic to understand how a pandemic can influence fertility rates. They find that fertility drops strongly 9 months after pandemic peaks and recovers to pre-pandemic levels only in cities who had public health interventions in place for longer.

(Sander Wagner, Felix Tropf, Nicolò Cavalli and Melinda Mills, ‘Pandemics, Public Health Interventions and Fertility: Evidence from the 1918 Influenza’. Published as a preprint on SocArXi Papers, doi: 10.31235/osf.io/f3hv8)