Subjective Expectations and Demand for Contraception

Grant Miller, Aureo de Paula and Christine Valente

Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: Nearly one-quarter of married, fertile-age women in Sub-Saharan Africa say that they want to avoid pregnancy but are not using contraceptives. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to study this puzzle in a developing country using detailed data on women’s subjec- tive probabilistic beliefs about contraception and contraceptive attributes. Policy counterfactuals based on a structural model suggest that costly interventions such as eliminating supply constraints would only have modest effects on contraceptive use. Alternatively, increasing partners’ approval of methods, aligning partners’ fertility preferences with women’s, and correcting women’s expectations about pregnancy risk absent contraception have the potential to increase use considerably. We provide additional empirical support for this last result through a before/after experiment in which we find that simply (and effectively) informing women about underlying pregnancy risk increases stated intentions to use contraception substantially, in line with our initial estimates.

Date: 2020-06-17
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/efm/media/workingpapers/w ... pdffiles/dp20724.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Subjective expectations and demand for contraception (2021)
Working Paper: Subjective Expectations and Demands for Contraception (2020)
Working Paper: Subjective Expectations and Demand for Contraception (2020)
Working Paper: Subjective Expectations and Demand for Contraception (2020)
Working Paper: Subjective expectations and demand for contraception (2020)
Working Paper: Subjective Expectations and Demand for Contraception (2020)
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:bri:uobdis:20/724

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vicky Jackson ().