My 2 cents on this: Making society more family friendly will require big changes. Baby bonuses might help raise birth rates, but small ones will not do much, if anything (see evidence from other countries.) We will need to reconsider society's treatment of children, including spending a lot more public $ on kids...

Baby Bonuses, Fertility Planning: Trump Aides Assess Ideas to Boost Birthrate nytimes.com/2025/04/21/us/… I'll throw making home ownership more accessible into the ring for consideration. Here's evidence from the mid-20th century Baby Boom (w/ @lisajdettling). Note this wasn't about getting urban rents down; these programs raised single-family home ownership rates for young couples. Of course, that was at a time when people wanted to have families (context always matters for policy effects) -nber.org/papers/w33446

‼️New paper from ⁦@lisajdettling⁩ & me finds that the govt backed low down payment mortgages introduced by FHA & VA in 1930s/40s helped set the stage for the mid-20th century baby boom by making it easier for young adults to buy their own home… nber.org/papers/w33446 We use newly digitized data on loan issuances (thx to our RAs who worked on that the past couple of summers!) & an IV strategy to isolate supply side variation in loan issuances.

Given interest in this topic, I (shamelessly) recommend the book “The Two-Parent Privilege.”
This is figure 4 in the book, and there’s an entire chapter of discussion about this very trend -
@DKThomp

https://twitter.com/dkthomp/status/1885313626841440265

Chapter 7 discusses the related changes in birth rates, including the decline in births to women under 30 and the rise in non-marital births to all groups -

With all due respect, this is a blind spot of academic economics that makes it easy to dismiss us in policy debates.

The conclusion that social welfare is increased relies on the assumption that work is “bad.” That proposition would strike most people as obviously flawed.

https://twitter.com/shamiltonian/status/1850979263438008620

I teach the labor/leisure model to my undergrads with exactly that assumption. It is a useful model! But then after we get the standard result, I ask “why might policy makers want to encourage work? Is it just to make people less happy?” No, obviously.

Seems like every month or so there is another essay suggesting that US births are down bc the price of having kids has gotten too expensive in the US over the past 15 yrs or so.

A look at data & evidence just doesn’t really support that explanation…

https://t.co/DzpITjanY1economicstrategygroup.org/publication/ke…

https://twitter.com/wsj/status/1690611704491892737

Here’s my take on the data & evidence w/ @phil_wellesley -

economicstrategygroup.org/publication/ke…