Fertility and old age security in an overlapping generations model

The impact on fertility of parents' desire to have children in order to provide support in old age is analyzed. "Two alternatives are compared with respect to their fertility outcome; one in which a parent in his old age receives a customary contribution from each of his children and another in which the society allocates the output produced by working young among the young and non-working old for their consumption. It is shown that there is no theoretical support for the view that old age security motive necessarily leads to higher fertility than socially optimal.... It is [also] shown that under certain assumptions about the shape of parental preferences over consumption in their working and retired life, exogenous changes in infant mortality will have no impact on fertility."