This suggests that the expansion of higher education is one of the major drivers of fertility decline and of the postponement of births at the aggregate level.5 In this paper, we follow this strand of literature according to which education leads to postponing the childbearing age, which in turn increases the probability of infertility, implying a negative correlation between the wage and the repr. [...] The size of these welfare inequalities depends on the structure of preferences, in particular the shape of the function u(·) and the level of the parameter Ω which captures the net welfare gain from having a child, and, hence, the pure welfare loss of remaining childless. [...] The last bullet point is a direct consequence of the government being utilitarian and of the individual’s utility being additively separable in the utility of consumption and in the utility from having a child. [...] Our results are summarized in the following proposition: Proposition 3 The decentralisation of the second-best utilitarian optimum requires that: • the labour supply of individuals with low productivity is taxed at the margin, • among individuals with low fecundity, the ART investment of type-2 agents is taxed (resp. [...] On the contrary, the decentralization of the ex-post egalitarian optimum unambiguously requires to tax the ART investment of the low-wage-low-fecundity individual.
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