Séminaire – Programme 3 / BxSE

Pauline Rossi 

(CREST)

Female Jobs and Fertility: Long-term Experimental Evidence from Ethiopian Factories

Abstract: We conducted an experiment with 27 factories in Ethiopia to test the widespread hypothesis that formal employment among women reduces fertility. Tracking respondents over eight years, we find that women who were randomly offered a job had more children than the control group: total births rose by 5% and childlessness fell by almost half. The effect on fertility emerged only after the effect on wage employment had vanished, around three years after the initial job offer. There is no effect on fertility preferences, bargaining power, or marital status, but clear effects on savings and household income. These patterns are consistent with a sequential model in which households face money and time constraints to achieve their fertility goals: the income effect is offset by the opportunity cost of time in the short run, but prevails in the long run. Our results suggest that women taking up factory jobs played little role in explaining why fertility declined as the country industrialized.