Corruption, fertility, and human capital

•Differences in fertility rates can be affected by corruption.•Officials that procure public services may be corrupted.•Reduced corruption improves the quality of productive public services.•This increases the parental return to human capital investments.•Households are induced to substitute child quality for child quantity.

We build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity–child quality trade-off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital. By integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous growth, corruption and fertility choices, we show that the negative relation between fertility and economic development may also be affected by differences in the magnitude of bureaucratic corruption.