Talks on income shocks and timing of fertility

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I presented preliminary results from Shamma Alam and my work on "Income Shocks, Contraceptive Use, and Timing of Fertility" at University of Oregon in Eugene on 16 November and I will be presenting at the UW labor and development brown bag tomorrow at 12.30. The abstract for the paper is below.

This paper examines the relationship between household income shocks and fertility decisions. Using panel data from Tanzania, we estimate the impact of agricultural shocks on contraception use, pregnancy, and the likelihood of childbirth. To account for unobservable household characteristics that potentially affect both shocks and fertility decisions we employ a fixed effects model. Households significantly increase their contraception use in response to income shocks from crop loss. This comes from an increased use of both traditional contraceptive methods and modern contraceptives. The poorer the household the stronger the effect of income shock on contraceptive use is. Furthermore, pregnancies and childbirth are significantly delayed for households experiencing a crop shock. For both pregnancy and childbirth the likelihood of delay as a result of shocks increases the poorer the household. We argue that these changes in behavior are the result of deliberate decisions of the households rather than income shocks' effects on other factors that influence fertility, such as women's health status, the absence or migration of spouse, and dissolution of partnerships.

Presented Gone with the Wind? paper at the CSAE Conference 2012: Economic Development in Africa

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I was in Oxford in March for the 2012 CSAE Conference: Economic Development in Africa. I presented my paper on the impact of hurricane risk on fertility and education decisions. The conference was great and the quality of the papers continues to increase. You can find the latest version of the paper under "Research" on this website. A full program can be found here.

New version of "Family Planning and Fertility: Estimating Program Effects using Cross-sectional Data"

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We (Kathleen Beegle, Luc Christiaensen and I) have just finished revising our paper on the effects of family planning on fertility in Ethiopia. You can find the new version, which has been submitted to a journal, here. The abstract is:

Although reproductive health advocates consider family planning programs the intervention of choice to reduce fertility, there remains a great deal of scepticism among economists as to their effectiveness, despite little rigorous evidence to support either position. This study explores the effects of family planning in Ethiopia using a novel set of instruments to control for potential non-random program placement. The instruments are based on ordinal rankings of area characteristics, motivated by competition between areas for resources. Access to family planning is found to reduce completed fertility by more than 1 child among women without education. No effect is found among women with some formal schooling, suggesting that family planning and formal education act as substitutes, at least in this low income, low growth setting. This provides support to the notion that increasing access to family planning can provide an important, complementary entry point to kick-start the process of fertility reduction.

A bit of "old" news on population growth

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I really meant to put this up about a month ago, but here we go. The UN recently released the World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision. This predicts that the world's population will be 9.3 billion by 2050 and will eventually reach 10.1 billion by 2100 using their medium variant. The larger increase compared to the revision two years ago is predominantly from slower than expected fertility declines and lower HIV/AIDS mortality. The NY Times has a nice piece about the new projections and you can find the full report here (once it is all available). The press release provides a bit more detail without being overly long. There are two things especially interesting. First, the new projections are the first based on new Bayesian methods developed here at the UW by Adrian Raftery and others. The UW Today has a little article about the work here. Second, it is very timely for my work with Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaensen (both from the World Bank) on the effects of family planning programs in Ethiopia. We show that family planning programs are substantially more effective than what have been found in previous studies. There are two likely reasons for this. First, we focus on the effect by education level and show that the whole effect is concentrated among women with no education. Second, instead of looking at countries that are undergoing rapid economic growth and demographic changes, such as Indonesian or Columbia, we study a poor country where there is little economic growth. We find that the total number of children a woman has declines by 1.2 with access to family planning. The paper is available here.

CSAE and PAA conferences

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Busy March: In addition to the PacDev mentioned below, I presented my work on family planning in Ethiopia at the 25th anniversary conference of the Centre for Studies of African Economies in Oxford and at the Population Association of America's annual meeting in Washington, DC. Mark Anderson and I also had a poster on our paper on the effects of dropping out of high school on sexually transmitted diseases.

Live plenary sessions from the Centre for Studies of African Economies conference

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I am heading to Oxford to participate in the CSAE conference. The plenary sessions will be aired live at http://www.csae.ox.ac.uk/conferences/2011-EdiA/video.html The program is: Sunday 20 March 2011 14: 30- 16:00 GMT Panel Debate: Research, African Economic Policy and the Role of Private Business

Monday 21 March 2011 8:30 -9:30 GMT Assessing the Millennium Villages Program

Monday 21 March 2011 9:30-10:30 GMT Keynote speech on 'Education as Liberation?' by leading US academic Michael Kremer

Tuesday 22 March 2011 16:30-18:30 GMT Panel Debate: Randomized Controlled Trials or Structural Models (or both... or neither...)?:

I will be presenting my work on family planning in Ethiopia (joint with Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaensen, both from the World Bank). Unfortunately, that will not be aired live ;-).

Pacific Conference for Development Economics (PacDev)

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I presented my paper on family planning in Ethiopia (joint with Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaesen, both from the World Bank) at the 8th annual Pacific Conference for Development Economics held at UC Berkeley. I also chaired a session on "Local Economic Shocks and Risk Sharing." As usual the conference was well attended and Ted Miguel did a great job at putting together a very nice conference.

CSDE seminar presentation on family planning in Ethiopia

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I am presenting my paper "Family Planning and Fertility: Estimating Program Effects using Cross-sectional Data" today at the CSDE seminar series. The seminar runs from 12.30 to 1.30 PM and is at Thomson Hall, rm 125. You can find the current version of the paper here. The paper is joint with Kathleen Beegle and Luc Christiaensen. The abstract is:

This paper uses a novel method of identifying the effects of a family planning program when there is endogenous program placement and only cross-sectional data are available, a situation common in many developing countries. Using data from Ethiopia we find that access to family planning substantially reduces the number of children ever born for women without education; the reduction is especially pronounced for women younger than 20 and older than 30. Completed fertility, measured as children ever born for women aged 40 to 45, falls by more than one birth with access to family planning. These effects are statistically significant and substantially larger than previous studies have found. For women who have gone to school there is no evidence of an impact of family planning on fertility. Based on a relative small reduction in child mortality we argue that the effect on fertility is due to family planning access and not the concurrent presence of health facilities. Finally, family planning access reduces unwanted fertility, especially for older women.

Human Health and Climate Change

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I am co-author on a chapter on "Human Health and Climate Change" in the book "Reducing Poverty, Protecting Livelihoods, and Building Assets in a Changing Climate: Social Implications of Climate Change Latin America and the Caribbean." The book is edited by Dorte Verner and just came out from the World Bank. More information is available from World Bank Publications. Update: You can also read the book through the embedded book below. [issuu layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml showflipbtn=true documentid=100708190344-b94b553ea2dc42089e4e36f33afb22a2 docname=9780821382387 username=World.Bank.Publications loadinginfotext=Reducing%20Poverty%2C%20Protecting%20Livelihoods%2C%20and%20Building%20Assets%20in%20a%20Changing%20Climate showhtmllink=true tag=adaptation width=420 height=315 unit=px]

Ghana

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I will be in Ghana from tomorrow until 22 June. Niels-Hugo Blunch and I are working on setting up a randomised evaluations of adult literacy programs in Ghana. Our paper, forthcoming in Economic Development and Cultural Change, explains more about the programs and their effects. Unfortunately, the data were not detailed enough for us to examine why there is a large positive effect of participation. The randomised evaluation is meant to address this question as described in the project summary.

Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs

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A substantially revised version of "Literacy, Skills and Welfare: Effects of Participation in Adult Literacy Programs" is available. It is joint work with Niels-Hugo Blunch. The abstract is here:

This paper examines the effect of adult literacy program participation on household consumption in Ghana. The adult literacy programs in Ghana are of special interest since they are more comprehensive than standard literacy programs and incorporate many additional topics. We use community fixed effects combined with instrumental variables to account for possible endogenous program placement and self-selection into program participation. For households where none of the adults have completed any formal education we find a substantial, positive and statistically significant effect on household consumption. Our preferred estimate of the effect of participation for households without education is equivalent to a ten percent increase in consumption per adult equivalent. The effects of participation on welfare for other households are smaller and not statistically significant, and become smaller the more educated the household is. We find positive and statistically significant effects of participation on literacy and numeracy rates, although the increases are too small to be the only explanation for the welfare effects. There is also evidence that participants are more likely to engage in market activities and to sell a variety of agricultural goods. Taking account of both direct cost and opportunity cost we argue that the social returns to adult literacy programs are substantial.