Reproductive Behavior among Nigerian Women

From a paper by Annamaria Milazzo: 

The findings indicate that women make fertility decisions that are motivated by the desire for giving birth to sons in Nigeria. Compared to women with a first-born son, women with a first-born daughter have and desire significantly more children, and use less contraceptives. Women with daughters among earlier-born children are also more likely to reduce the spacing between births, thereby increasing the risk of child and maternal mortality. Results suggest that son preference also has significant impacts on other aspects of women’s well-being. Women with first-born daughters are significantly more likely to end up in a polygynous union, to be divorced, and to be heads of the household. p. 34.

HT: Viviana Di Giovinazzo

Selling the Fantasy of Fertility

From The New York Times 

The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology reports that, on average, of the 1.5 million assisted reproductive cycles performed worldwide, only 350,000 resulted in the birth of a child. That is a 77 percent global failure rate. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the overall failure rate at almost 70 percent.

Full article.  

Fertility Decision (Medellín and Latin America)

This is one of those articles where the introduction is very informative

In the last 50 years there has been a substantial reduction in the world's total fertility rate (TFR). The Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC) region is not an exception to this rule, and it has experienced a deep process of demographic transition. The reduction in the total fertility rates is a homogeneous phenomenon throughout the entire region. An illustration of the state of demographic transition in the LAC region can be observed from the behavior of the TFR during the first decade of this century. The region's TFR was 2.67 children per woman in 1999, and by the end of 2010 the TFR was 2.12. Surprisingly close to the widely accepted replacement rate of 2.1.

The evolution of the fertility rate for young populations is especially important because of the negative consequences of teenage childbearing. This is a problem widely associated in the literature to low human development and poverty (Joshi and Schultz, 2007; Buvinic, 1998; Burt, 1998; Gage, 1995; Singh and Wulf, 1990; Hayes, 1987). During the last decade, there has been also a reduction in the Fertility Rate for women between 15 and 19 (FR15-19) in the LAC region. The FR15-19 decreased from 83.95 children per 1000 women in 1999 to 71.68 in 2010. Certainly, this is an important reduction in the FR15-19; nevertheless, in general terms it has been smaller that the reduction that the TFR has experienced during the same period. Between 1999 and 2010, the reduction in the TFR was 26% while the reduction in the FR15-19 was 17%. This is a very interesting phenomenon which, among other things, implies that adolescent fertility has become a more important component of total fertility in most of the LAC countries. This means that relative to adult fertility, adolescent fertility is becoming greater and greater in Latin America. 

With some exception like Argentina and Peru, the contribution of adolescent fertility to the total fertility has increased continuously in almost all LAC Countries. As mentioned before, this is due to the faster reduction of the fertility rate for the adult population in comparison to the rate for teenagers' population (Florez and Soto, 2007B). A good illustration of this phenomenon can be observed from the evolution of the ratio adolescent fertility to total fertility (per 1000 women). In 1999, adolescent fertility was 15.72% of total fertility in developing LAC countries, and by 2010 this ratio had increased to 16.29%. There are some remarkable cases as Brazil and Ecuador where the ratio adolescent fertility to total fertility increased by more than 2 percentage points between 1999 and 2010. The result of this phenomenon is, on average, an earlier individual onset of childbearing.

The article is by Leonardo Fabio Morales who attributes to peer effects why the reduction on FR15-19 is lower than TFR in LA. 

HT: Clarence Nkengne Tsimpo

The political economy of fertility

Unconsciously I have had a preference for papers on fertility and gender, and that is because their conclusions are often counterintuitive and surprising, or simply interesting. Take this paper for example:

The abstract:

This paper studies the political economy of fertility. Specifically, I argue that fertility may be a strategic choice for ethnic groups engaged in redistributive conflict. I first present a simple conflict model where high fertility is optimal for each ethnic group if and only if the economy’s ethnic diversity is high, institutions are weak, or both. I then test the model in a cross-national dataset. Consistent with the theory, I find that economies where the product of ethnic diversity and a measure of institutional weakness is high have increased fertility rates. I conclude that fertility may depend on political factors.

A draft of the paper is here. It is published in Public Choice (June 2013) an it is by Thorsten Janus.

Cultural Influences and Fertility (Germany)

Based on a 1% sample of the German population, we study how fertility rates in the country of origin — a proxy for cultural imprint — influence the fertility outcomes of first- and second-generation female immigrants. We use both total fertility rates in the year of migration and a new measure of completed cohort fertility rates in the countries of origin as well as direct survey measures of fertility norms. Our large data set allows us to focus on a relatively narrow range for age at migration and to estimate models that rely on within-country variation only, leading to more credible identification. We find a statistically significant, sizeable and robust effect of country-of-origin fertility rates on fertility outcomes. The effect is strongest for the first generation and becomes weaker, though still statistically significant, for “generation 1.5” (migrants arriving as children) and the second generation. It is stronger for women with low education and for women who live with a partner from the same country of origin.

Source: Stichnoth & Yeter (2013). 

Zero children

. . . the puzzles of decreasing fertility in Europe (Pritchett and Viarengo, Population and Development Review, February 2013).

Fertility rate and female education (the US)

The graph is from the paper "Do Highly Educated Women Choose Smaller Families?" by Hazan & Zoabi (January 2012).

The authors explain:

We show that highly educated women substitute a significant part of their own parenting with childcare. This enables them to have more children and work longer hours, consistent with the evidence.

Graphs of the day

They are from the paper "Fertility Decline in the Muslim World: A Veritable Sea-Change, Still Curiously Unnoticed" by Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah (December 2011).