Population and Technological Growth: Evidence from Roe v. Wade

Abstract: We exploit the heterogeneous impact of the Roe v. Wade ruling by the US Supreme Court, which ruled most abortion restrictions unconstitutional. Our identifying assumption is that states which had not liberalized their abortion laws prior to Roe would experience a negative birth shock of greater proportion than states which had undergone pre-Roe reforms. We estimate the difference-in-difference in births and use estimated births as an exogenous treatment variable to predict patents per capita. Our results show that one standard deviation increase in cohort starting population increases per capita patents by 0.24 standard deviation. These results suggest that at the margins, increasing fertility can increase patent production. Insofar as patent production is a sufficient proxy for technological growth, increasing births has a positive impact on technological growth. This paper and its results do not pertain to the issue of abortion itself.