Accounting for child mortality in the Pre-Industrial European economy

What causes a country to be trapped in a Malthusian economy? This question has determined a countless number of studies emphasizing different factors that are often assigned an important role in the emergence of modern growth such as the relationship between demographic factors and changes in institutions that promote innovation, or the production of new ideas or the development of education or improvements in technology. In this paper we examine a basic factor, the probability of child surviving. The risk of premature death should impinge on fertility and it is determined by the fertility itself in determined contexts (technology, diseases, land exploitation). Taking into account stochastic mortality, we find a negative relationship between child mortality and birth rate. Contrary to our results, a number of existing works argues that with stochastic mortality a large precautionary demand for children arises, which would lead to a negative effect of mortality decline on net fertility.