Thread by @lymanstoneky

Back in February 2020, I predicted that births would fall sharply in late 2020 and early 2021. I was correct, they did.

Most high-mortality events are staccato: they hit suddenly then fade just as suddenly. So there are usually rapid recoveries of fertility.

But the shock of COVID wasn't like that. It lingered. Death rates stayed high and employment rates have stayed low. As a result, I and many others (like @kearney_melissa and Phillip Levine) thought there would be a big birth decline which would linger for a while.

And indeed, in a model predicting births nine months later at the state level based on monthly employment and mortality, births should still be WAY below the prior year's levels. We should STILL be in a baby drought now and for months to come.

But call up any hospital in the country and they'll tell you.... that's not what's happening. They're seeing a lot of babies, more than usual.

I was skeptical of this... but the latest CDC provisional data confirm: by March, births were normalizing. This is very odd!

In my post today for @FamStudies , I show evidence that births are recovering faster than anybody expected, and that this recovery is driven by generous financial supports to families (stimulus, UI, and CTC) as well as the shift to remote work. ifstudies.org/blog/births-ar…

So here's birth data. January 2021 really was an epochal shock in terms of births. Biggest YoY decline in decades.

But by March, normalcy!

And in the 10 states with data more recent than March, we're basically already back at pre-COVID birth rates!

And those hospitals? I've got data on two big ones (UVA and Michigan). They are both showing data above normal: U Michigan's EMRs show elevated pregnancy appointments, and UVA has seen a ton of babies.

There are numerous media stories around saying similar things for other hospitals. Obviously, individual hospital data has to be taken with a grain of salt since local changes can swamp longer trends, but it also shouldn't be ignored when the national data is pointing up too!

So.... what happened?

Why, in the midst of the worst peacetime mortality event
in living memory, with employment rates in the crapper and life monumentally disrupted by school closures and business closures and masks and etc etc etc.... why? Why so many babies?

There are a LOT of candidate explanations. One explanation we don't review much in the piece: maybe exposure to death nudged people to reconsider their fertility preferences. We don't review it much because what analysis I've done suggests it's incorrect.

i.e. in our surveys we don't find that living in a state with higher excess mortality is a good predictor of a shift to higher fertility desires.

There's better evidence of a shift towards greater familism. So in this theory, changed social circles due to lockdowns and shutdowns and everything else compressed peoples' lives to center on their family, which may have motivated more familistic attitudes.

We do mention this theory but don't engage with it in depth because 1) we've done so elsewhere, 2) precise empirical data to link this to birth changes is still a bit thin. So in terms of directly explaining a very-specifically-timed recovery, it's hard to attribute.

So we focus instead on two other theories which we think have really good candidate status to explain why US births are crushing the models:
1) Stimulus checks, pandemic UI, and the Child Tax Credit made a HUGE difference for families, buoying income and motivating fertility....

2) Remote work, and especially the expectation of FUTURE remote work, created a prospect of much better work-life balance.

So for example, we know that before COVID just 5% of workers were remote, but by mid-2020 ***20%*** expected to still be remote as of 2022. This is based on surveys reported here: nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/…

We also know that home sales exploded in the summer of 2020. At first they boomed a bit *after* stimulus checks went out; but the 2nd and 3rd waves prompted *immediate* booms in home sales. To me, that smells like learning!

Basically, it took people a little while to adjust to the new way of life with COVID. March-May were extremely disruptive and chaotic and fearful. But by the summer, fiscal supports were landing, people were adjusting to the new world, school was out anyways for summer....

... and people were starting to make lemonade out of their lemons. People were absolutely gambling that remote work was gonna stick. They were absolutely using stimulus money and new remote options to relocate.

We know they relocated disproportionately out of markets with smaller average house size into markets with larger, which is consistent with space for babies being a possible consideration in that move.

We also know that by the summer of 2020, forward guidance existed. People knew UI would continue for at least a little while, they believed remote work would continue for a long time.... one wonders if they expected additional stimulus rounds?

We do know from surveys that tons of people expected COVID to continue for many months or a year or more to come. It's reasonable that if people thought COVID would continue they may also have though stimulus payments would continue.

And since the stimmies were *per person*, one wonders if people figured that was likely to continue.

And by "one wonders," I mean I personally know people who explicitly believed it was gonna happen again. And also I believed that.

My point is, paradoxically, if you believed that COVID was gonna linger for a year, you probably thought payment-for-being-out-of-work was gonna continue. Maternity pay! And you probably though stimulus checks were gonna come again. Baby bonus!

And you probably though remote work was gonna stick around. Changed labor norms!

This is the stuff that the research says *should* boost fertility!

So while I did not actually expect this fast rebound because *gestures generally at everything*, I probably should have. The amount we're punching "above projections" is pretty comparable to what you'd expect from a child allowance program of similar scale!

boom-LET. Tiny. Small. Not a baby boom. A RAPID RETURN TO NORMAL. An accelerated end to excessively low pregnancy. But NOT a boom.

https://twitter.com/mattsclancy/status/1419762168061378562

In other words, I think we kinda did a test on pro-natal policy and what we found is if we have pro-natal policy we can push birth rates considerably above what "business as usual" would predict.

It's amazing how literally dozens of high quality empirical papers saying the same thing are usually not totally wrong!