My paper, "How Is Fertility Behavior in Africa Different?," has been conditionally accepted at Demography. The final version should follow soon. Until then, here is the abstract.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s fertility decline has progressed much slower than in other regions. Using large-scale woman-level data, I provide new evidence on how fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa compares to East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America by examining fertility outcomes by grade level across regions. Unlike prior research that focuses on aggregate fertility outcomes, I estimate fertility outcomes and total fertility rates separately by region, area of residence, age group, and grade level. I demonstrate that differences in fertility between Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions first increase and then decrease with years of education, with little consistent evidence for differences among better-educated women. Furthermore, for grade levels with significantly higher fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa than in other regions, the differences are substantially smaller for surviving children compared to children ever born. To proxy for school quality, I use women’s literacy and show that the results for literacy rates follow a similar pattern to the fertility outcomes. Overall, the results suggest that offspring mortality and the lower quality of primary schooling are important contributors to higher fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa compared to other regions.