Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa: the Role of Inheritance

Sébastien Fontenay, Paula Gobbi and Marc Goñi

No 2024-01, Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Abstract: Fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa is the highest in the world and it should continue boosting population growth for decades to come. In this paper,we showcase a new driver of fertility decisions that has been largely overlooked by demographers and economists: inheritance rules. In particular,we demonstrate that impartible inheritance (i.e. transmission of the deceased's property to a single heir) does not incentivize households to limittheir number of children. Our main empirical strategy links data from the past on deep-rooted inheritance customs for more than 800 ethnic groupswith modern demographic surveys covering 24 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our spatial Regression Discontinuity Design exploiting ancestralborders reveals that belonging to an ethnic group with impartible inheritance customs increases fertility by 0.85 children per woman. We alsoestablish, both theoretically and empirically, that the fertility differences across inheritance rules are larger in lands that are less labor intensive.

Keywords: Fertility; Inheritance; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66 p.
Date: 2024-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev and nep-gro
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published by:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/3674 ... Y_GONI-fertility.pdf Œuvre complète ou partie de l'œuvre (application/pdf)

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:eca:wpaper:2013/367474

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://hdl.handle.ne ... lb.ac.be:2013/367474

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers ECARES from ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Benoit Pauwels ().