Population Policies, Fertility, Women's Human Capital, and Child Quality

58 Pages Posted: 14 May 2007

See all articles by T. Paul Schultz

T. Paul Schultz

Yale University - Economic Growth Center; IZA Institute of Labor Economics

Date Written: May 2007

Abstract

Population policies are defined here as voluntary programs which help people control their fertility and expect to improve their lives. There are few studies of the long-run effects of policy-induced changes in fertility on the welfare of women, such as policies that subsidize the diffusion and use of best practice birth control technologies. Evaluation of the consequences of such family planning programs almost never assess their long-run consequences, such as on labor supply, savings, or investment in the human capital of children, although they occasionally estimate the short-run association with the adoption of contraception or age-specific fertility. The dearth of long-run family planning experiments has led economists to consider instrumental variables as a substitute for policy interventions which not only determine variation in fertility but are arguably independent of the reproductive preferences of parents or unobserved constraints that might influence family life cycle behaviors. Using these instrumental variables to estimate the effect of this exogenous variation in fertility on family outcomes, economists discover these "cross effects" of fertility on family welfare outcomes tend to be substantially smaller in absolute magnitude than the OLS estimates of partial correlations referred to in the literature as evidence of the beneficial social externalities associated with the policies that reduce fertility. The paper summarizes critically the empirical literature on fertility and development and proposes an agenda for research on the topic.

Keywords: Consequences of fertility decline, child quality, evaluation of population policies

JEL Classification: J13, J24, O15

Suggested Citation

Schultz, T. Paul, Population Policies, Fertility, Women's Human Capital, and Child Quality (May 2007). Yale University Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper No. 954, IZA Discussion Paper No. 2815, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=985956 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.985956

T. Paul Schultz (Contact Author)

Yale University - Economic Growth Center ( email )

Box 208269
New Haven, CT 06520-8269
United States
203-432-3620 (Phone)
203-432-5591 (Fax)

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

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