Highly educated women are no longer childless: The role of marketization

Baudin et al. (2015) document that childlessness rates in the U.S. in 1990 exhibited a U-shaped relationship with women's education, with highly educated women much more likely to be childless than other women. We show that this is no longer true: the childlessness rate of highly educated women has converged to that of other women. We argue that highly educated women are now able to marketize the time cost of child rearing, allowing them to have both a family and a career.