The Economic Approach to Fertility: A Causal Mediation Analysis

Gauthier Kashalala and Steven Koch

No 201434, Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics

Abstract: This study develops an economic fertility model which explicitly incorporates both the costs of childrearing and contraception behaviour. In this setting, a couple capacity to procreate depends on their fecundity, as well as their contraception and sexual behaviours; and the ideal number of children is chosen by maximizing the utility of children, subject to a budget constraint reflecting the couple's income, and their specific explicit and implicit costs of rearing children. Using a nonparametric causal mediation framework (Pearl, 2009; Heckman and Pinto, 2013), our analysis explicitly explores the role of family planning services and the cost of children in mediating the causal effect of income on fertility, subject to unmeasurable fecundity and unobserved sexual risk taking behaviour. In particular, we discuss the definition, identification and estimation of a variety of causal effects, namely, the direct income e ect, the contraception effect, and price effect.

JEL-codes: C14 D13 I38 J13 J38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2014-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.up.ac.za/media/shared/61/WP/wp_2014_34.zp39438.pdf (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:pre:wpaper:201434

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Pretoria, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Rangan Gupta ().