An Urban Legend?! Power Rationing, Fertility and its Effects on Mothers

Thiemo Fetzer, Oliver Pardo and Amar Shanghavi

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: This paper answers the question whether extreme power rationing can induce changes in human fertility and thus, generate "mini baby booms". We study a period of extensive power rationing in Colombia that lasted for most of 1992 and see whether this has increased births in the subsequent year, exploiting variation from a newly constructed measure of the extent of power rationing. We find that power rationing increased the probability that a mother had a baby by 4 percent and establish that this effect is permanent as mothers who had a black out baby were not able to adjust their total long-run fertility. Exploiting this variation, we show that women who had a black-out baby find themselves in worse socio-economic conditions more than a decade later, highlighting potential social costs of unplanned motherhood.

Keywords: Fertility; infrastructure; blackouts; unplanned parenthood (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 J13 J16 O18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Working Paper: An urban legend?! Power rationing, fertility and its effects on mothers (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1247

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