But there are a hundred caveats to the notion that cash transfers drive up birthrates. Some subsidies encourage family formation and some encourage particularly unwed births. Some speed up births, but they don’t appear to increase the number of births. Others have no effect on birthrates.
The simple lesson from all the available data is this:
To help people have more children, just give them cash, either unconditionally or on the condition of having children. Any other effort to subsidize families, such as subsidizing work or subsidizing child care, has no effect, a tiny effect, or even a negative effect on family formation.
A new study out of Finland reaffirms this general rule in a very specific way. The Finnish government randomly awarded work subsidies to men and women. The finding is a bit awkward in these days of gender equity: If you subsidize work for men, birthrates go up. If you subsidize work for women, birthrates go down.
Check out these two charts highlighted by demographer Lyman Stone: