Using a district-level panel data constructed from four waves of decennial Indian Census covering 1981-2011, we examine the medium run (1991-2001) and long run (1991-2011) impacts of the 1991 trade liberalization in India on marriage and fertility rates among young women aged 15-34 years. We...

Low female schooling attainment, early marriage, and low age at first birth are major policy concerns in developing countries. This paper jointly estimates the determinants of educational attainment, marriage age, and age of first birth among females 12 to 25 years of age in Madagascar,...

Earnings in mid-career and children are two fundamental outcomes of the life-choices of men and women. Both require time and other resources and reflect the accumulated priorities of individuals and couples. We explore how these outcomes have changed for Swedish men and women born 1945-1962 by...

Using multiple births as an Instrumental Variable (IV) for family size and data for 43 developing countries, I find evidence that a shock in fertility has a cost for a family as a whole. Mothers are more likely to live under less stable family arrangements and they are more likely to use...

People’s childbearing intentions change over their lives. These changes are sometimes conceptualised as a response to constraints such as the biological clock or lack of a partner. However, we find that they are influenced by a much wider range of factors: social norms; adaptation to the...

In this paper I make use of longitudinal household data to examine the decline in the Total Fertility Rate in Russia from 2.0 in 1989 to 1.3 in 2001. Using individual and community-level panel data spanning the 1994-2001 era, I find that the decline in household income can account for about a...

This paper analyzes the impact of relaxing the One-Child Policy to the Two-Child Policy (TCP) on the employment of couples in China. By exploiting the regional variation in the timing of the policy implementation and the differences in exposure to the policy by subpopulation and by cohorts, we...

This paper presents new causal evidence on the "power" of oral contraceptives in shaping women's lives, leveraging the 1970 liberalization of the Pill for minors in the Netherlands and demand- and supply-side religious preferences that affected Pill take-up. We analyze administrative data to...

Research has shown a strong negative correlation between birth order and cognitive test scores, IQ, and educational outcomes. We ask whether birth order differences in health are present at birth using matched administrative data for more than 1,000,000 children born in Denmark between 1981 and...

This paper presents microeconomic simulation techniques to examine what drives differences in inequality across countries. The simulation decomposes cross-country inequality differences into the importance of individual decisions, such as fertility, mating, labor force participation, and...