The purpose of this paper is to show within a simple setting how the demand for children may be affected by the type of parent-children interaction, ranging from conflict with threat to more harmonious settlement. We consider the case where parents offer bequests to their children in exchange for attention. The type of parent-child interaction is formalized by the solution concept that is used to determine the bequest-attention allocation for any given number of children. The main positive finding of the paper is that there is a bias toward large families, counteracted by the possibility of a pure preference for small families and the costs of having children. Copyright 1991 by The London School of Economics and Political Science.
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