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Between 1965 and 1985, the Western world and the United States in particular experienced a staggering amount of social and economic change. In Birth Quake, Diane J. Macunovich argues that the common thread underlying all these changes was the post-World War II baby boom-in particular, the passage of the baby boomers into young adulthood. Macunovich focuses on the pervasive effects of changes in "relative cohort size," the ratio of young to middle-aged adults, as masses of young people tried to achieve the standard of living to which they had become accustomed in their parents' homes despite dramatic reductions in their earning potential relative to that of their parents. Macunovich presents the results of detailed empirical analyses that illustrate how varied and important cohort effects can be on a wide range of economic indicators, social factors, and even on more tumultuous events including the stock market crash of 1929, the "oil shock" of 1973, and the "Asian flu" of the 1990s. Birth Quake demonstrates that no discussion of business or economic trends can afford to ignore the effects of population.

Relative cohort size—the ratio of young adults to prime‐age adults—and relative income—the income of young adults relative to their material aspirations—have experienced substantial changes over the past 40 years. Results here show that changes in relative cohort size explain about 60 percent of the declines in women's starting wage—both relative and absolute—in 1968–82, and 97 percent of its increase in 1982–2001. Relative income is hypothesized to affect a number of behavioral choices by young adults, including marriage, childbearing, and female labor force participation, as young people strive to achieve their desired standard of living. Older family income—the denominator in a relative income variable—increased by 59 percent between 1968 and 2000, and then declined by 9 percent. Its changes explain 47 percent of the increase in the labor force participation of white married women in their first 15 years out of school between 1970 and 1990, and 38 percent of the increase in hours worked in the same period. The study makes use of individual‐level measures of labor force participation and employs the lagged income of older families in a woman's year‐state‐race‐education group to instrument parental income and hence material aspirations.

Using United Nations estimates of age structure and vital rates for 184 countries at five‐year intervals from 1950 through 1995, this article demonstrates how changes in relative cohort size appear to have affected patterns of fertility across countries since 1950—not just in developed countries, but perhaps even more importantly in developing countries as they pass through the demographic transition. The increase in relative cohort size (defined as the proportion of males aged 15–24 relative to males aged 25–59), which occurs as a result of declining mortality rates among infants, children, and young adults during the demographic transition, appears to act as the mechanism that determines when the fertility portion of the transition begins. As hypothesized by Richard Easterlin, the increasing proportion of young adults generates a downward pressure on young men's relative wages (or on the size of landhold‐ings passed on from parent to child), which in turn causes young adults to accept a tradeoff between family size and material wellbeing, setting in motion a "cascade" or "snowball" effect in which total fertility rates tumble as social norms regarding acceptable family sizes begin to change.