In the Name of the Father? Fertility, Religion, and Child Naming in the Demographic Transition

Abstract

This article shows that parents reveal information about their fertility behavior through how they name their children. I arrive at this finding from a detailed examination of the net fertility of 130,000 married couples in Ireland, a country known for its historically high fertility rate, circa 1911. After stringently accounting for couples' occupation, religion, and location, I find higher fertility rates among couples who chose distinctly Catholic names and traditional names for their children, with the latter being particularly important. Exposure to towns and cities lowered net fertility and weakened preferences for traditional and Catholic names. Cumulatively, these findings highlight the role of traditional rural norms over explicitly religious influences in driving high fertility rates in Ireland. The impact of towns and cities in reducing net fertility suggests that Ireland's sluggish urbanization was a key factor in its high historical fertility rate.

Naming the Precious Child: New Evidence of Intentional Family Planning in Historical Populations

“…The study of chil dren's names and fer til ity was pioneered by Hacker (1999), who man u ally clas si fied names by their bib li cal ori gin and argued that nam ing reflected reli gi os ity. Our study is dif fer ent in that it builds on recent inno va tions in the automated clas si fi ca tion and scor ing of names based on their sta tis ti cal dis tri bu tions (Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson 2020;Connor 2021;Fryer and Levitt 2004;Goldstein and Stecklov 2016).…”

“…In our train-test frame work used later in the paper, we esti mate scores based on a sub sam ple. 2 This pat tern of non tra di tional names being asso ci ated with smaller fam i lies was explored by Connor (2021), who used rel a tive fre quency in the pre vi ous gen er a tion rather than some fixed fea ture (i.e., whether the name appears in a list or fixed ref er ence) to define which names are "tra di tional."…”

“…In con trast, our approach uses infor ma tion built into the data to score names according to one or more char ac ter is tics. This approach was employed in early work in eco nomics to study dis crim i na tion (Fryer and Levitt 2004) and has been fur ther devel oped in demo graphic stud ies in recent years (Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson 2020;Connor 2021;Goldstein and Stecklov 2016).…”

“…(Thompson 1942:206) More mod ern, less tra di tional nam ing was an expres sion of this ambi tion. In the con text of Ireland, recent work has shown that the fac tors driv ing the slow pace of decline of fer til ity were tied to tra di tional norms, evi dent also in names, but that they were largely rooted in lag ging lev els of urban i za tion and the rela tion ship to "new infor ma tion and aspi ra tion" (Connor 2021).…”

“…We used an auto mated pro ce dure for scor ing names and did not delve fur ther into the many inter est ing fea tures and char ac ter is tics of names. Alternative approaches are given in the exam ple by Connor (2021) in Ireland, which com pares name frequen cies across gen er a tions, and in the early paper by Hacker (1999) using bib lical nam ing.…”