Carl Schmertmann

In NJ suburbs I refer to it as “hedge fund fours” — rich enough to have the luxury of 4 children (and a lot of help)

We (@thehauer and I) have an alternative estimate of TFR > 3 for those million-a-year-plus folks. We're still checking it carefully, though.

Is that household income in the pre-birth year? Otherwise income would naturally fall with births due to leave taking. (The very high incomes obvs have something different going on))

Excellent point. ACS Qs refer to births and total HH income over the 12 months before the survey date. On avg births would have happened 6 months into the period for which income is reported. In short: you're right that recent births might cause lower recent incomes.

Wow I've been making this case to friends and family. What is the source - is there a link? Thx.

This is from the American Community Survey, a US Census product. This is accumulated data from monthly samples over 2012-2016, and uses the Qs on HH income and whether/not women had a birth in the past year. Raw data is at https://usa.ipums.org/usa/ 

reasons???????

The cost of children varies with income. Women in "middle" income households are most likely to be in the labor market, so they face higher $ costs for each hour spent on child-raising.

Very interesting. We need to explore this in @DSTdk data.

I know of at least one working paper that did this using Swedish data!