The effect of a male biased fertility stopping rule on undesired fertility

Details

Supervisors

Cassan, Guilhem ; Bosmans, Kristof

Faculty

Faculté des sciences économiques, sociales, politiques et de communication

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences économiques, orientation générale

Abstract

We study the effect of a male biased fertility stopping rule on the incidence of undesired fertility. Our approach is based on the fact that not all families will attain their desired composition of children within their desired fertility. Therefore, in the case of son preferences, we expect a proportion of the families who did not attain their desired number of sons to continue childbearing in order to satisfy their desire for sons, hence leading to undesired fertility. We develop a multiway fixed effects approach to estimate the number of subsequent births as a function of whether a mother is missing boys or girls with respect to her ideal gender composition at the desired fertility level. Using the Demographic and Health Survey of 2015 for India, we find that once the desired fertility level is attained, women who are missing one boy with respect to their ideal gender composition have on average 0.561 additional subsequent births compared to women who are missing one girl. When two children and more than two children are missing, the differential increases to 0.714 and 0.655, respectively. We calculate that a male biased fertility stopping rule explains 13.5% of the total women’s undesired fertility and accounts for 3.2% of the total fertility. When the husbands’ reported preferences are considered, we find that missing one boy rather than a girl once the desired fertility is attained increases the average number of subsequent births by 0.629 births. When the number of missing children is superior to one, we find a differential number of subsequent births for missing boys of 0.589 births. In return, this explains 17.4% of the total husband’s undesired fertility and accounts for 3.56% of the total fertility.