It’s Raining Babies? Flooding and Fertility Choices in Bangladesh

Brian C. Thiede, Joyce Chen, Valerie Mueller, Yuanyuan Jia and Carolynne Hultquist
Additional contact information
Brian C. Thiede: The Pennsylvania State University

No cz482, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: A growing demographic literature has examined the impacts of climatic variability on human populations. Most of this work has focused on migration, morbidity, and mortality. Much less attention has been given to the effects of climate change on fertility, which represents an important gap given many plausible reasons to expect such effects. We address this issue by examining the relationship between exposure to flooding and fertility in Bangladesh. We link birth records (n=355,532 person-years) from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) with satellite-derived measures of flooding from 2002 through 2014 and estimate statistical models of the relationship between flood exposure and subsequent fertility outcomes. We also conduct secondary analyses of the relationship between flood exposure and four expected causal pathways: women’s marriage, contraceptive use, employment, and health. Results suggest that flood exposure reduces the probability of childbearing, and that this effect operates with a two-year lag. Negative effects are concentrated among women with a primary school education or higher and low-parity women. In contrast, women at high parities (e.g., at or above four) tend to increase their fertility in response to flooding. We find little evidence that observed flooding effects operate through the causal pathways we test, raising questions for future research about the mechanisms that explain our findings.

Date: 2020-04-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-env and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/5e8fbe10d697350271bdba63/

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:cz482

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/cz482

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().