I’m excited to tell you about my new paper with @umitgurun. We document a striking new fact: Birth rates in the US are robustly lower in areas of higher local racial diversity, after controlling for a huge range of alternative factors. We then try to understand why this is.
1/N This links the two largest demographic changes of our age:
i) The large increase in racial diversity, and
ii) The large decrease in birth rates
There’s been a large and puzzling decline in US birth rates since 2007. The rise in diversity explains almost 89% of this drop.

2/N