Effects of Fertility Decline on Family Well Being: Opportunities for Evaluating Population Programs*

The paper considers the association between fertility and family outcomes. Voluntary population programs are supported to help people control their fertility and improve their lives, but just how strong is this link? Evaluations of family planning programs rarely isolate the contribution of policies to fertility reduction and thereby to the long run welfare of families. Many other developments are attributed a role in declining fertility. Do these two distinct sources of fertility variation have different welfare implications? To identify the effect of fertility, such as might be caused by exogenous factors including policies, empirical analysis has focused on the consequences of twins, the sex composition of initial births, and subsidies to local family planning, all of which may impact fertility independently of desired fertility and affect other family outcomes, such as the mother’s market labor supply, and the health and schooling of her children. Instrumental variable estimates of the “cross-effect” of fertility on family welfare tend to be about half as large as the direct OLS estimates. Are quantity and quality of children really substitutes, and are the family benefits of exogenous fertility decline as large as the cross sectional associations would suggest?