Does Education Reduce Fertility in a Low Income Country ? Evidence based on Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design in Tanzania

Salome Maseki and Hisahiro Naito

Tsukuba Economics Working Papers from Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Tsukuba

Abstract: Using adoption of no-expulsion policy in primary schools in Tanzania and a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we examine the causal effect of education on fertility and child mortality using Tanzania census data sets. A no-expulsion policy in Tanzania generates a discontinuous change of years of schooling of females by about 2 years. Using this change of years of schooling, we show that the effect of education on fertility is non-uniform in the sense that one year increase of female schooling {\sl increases} the probability of having at least one birth by 1.55 percentage point but it {\sl decreases} the probability of having a large number of births such as at least 8 births or 10 births by about 3 percentage points. This suggest that it is not sufficient to focus on the average number of births to examine the effect of education on fertility. We also find that one year increase of schooling decreases the number of experienced child death by 0.2 frequency and decrease the child mortality rate by 2 percentage point. Due to those several offsetting effects, the effect of additional year of schooling on the number of surviving children is very close to zero or marginally positive.

Date: 2019-01
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