Family planning in a life-cycle model with income risk

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Several US states have recently restricted the access to abortions. We study fertility intentions and how family planning and abortions are used as mechanisms to control fertility among couples facing income risk. We formulate and estimate a life-cycle consumption-saving model with uninsurable income risk and imperfect contraceptive control that matches fertility behavior in the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) well. We use the estimated model to investigate how family planning and abortions are used to control fertility in our model. Our simulations suggest that income risk affects family planning and that abortion is used to control fertility due to the presence of income risk. This indicates that the availability of abortions might play a role as an insurance mechanism.

Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Applied Econometrics
Volume35
Issue number5
Pages (from-to)567-586
ISSN0883-7252
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Bibliographical note

This article has earned an Open Data Badge for making publicly available the digitally‐shareable data necessary to reproduce the reported results. The data is available at [http://qed.econ.queensu.ca/jae/datasets/ejraes001].

ID: 247071028