Though linked, the relationship between legalized abortion and contraception use remains largely unexplored. This study seeks to fill this gap by examining young women’s contraceptive decisions and the additional costs, direct and indirect, imposed by restrictive abortion legislation and...

Following the legalization of abortion in the United States, scholars have studied its impact on a wide variety of factors including women’s educational choices and labor force decisions, abortion rates, and most controversially, crime. Economists have also investigated the determinants of...

This paper investigates empirically whether financial incentives, and in particular governmental child subsidies, affect fertility. We use a comprehensive, nonpublic, individual-level panel dataset that includes fertility histories and detailed individual controls for all married Israeli women...

Economic agents routinely face various types of economic uncertainty. Seldom have these various forms of uncertainty manifested themselves more sharply than in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the transition was especially rapid and sharp since East...

This paper documents that mortgage market deregulation helps mitigate the risk of population aging by affecting a foundational family-level decision: the choice to have children. Using a US federal regulator ruling, I show that young households fully exposed to mortgage market deregulation...

Prior to 1996, Israelis in collective communities (kibbutzim) shared the costs of raising children equally. This paper examines the impact of the privatization of kibbutzim on fertility behavior among members. We find that fertility declined by 6-15 percent following the shift to privatization....

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

This article uses China's family planning policies to quantify and explain spillovers in fertility decisions. We test whether ethnic minorities decreased their fertility in response to the policies, although only the majority ethnic group, the Han Chinese, were subject to birth quotas. We...

Lower fertility can translate into a more male-biased sex ratio if son preference is persistent and technology for sex-selection is easily accessible. This paper investigates whether financial incentives can overcome this trade-off in the context of an Indian scheme, Devirupak, that seeks to...