Biography:

Pauline Rossi is an Associate Professor of Economics at Ecole Polytechnique-CREST and a Research Affiliate at CEPR. Her fields of research are Applied Microeconomics, Development Economics and Family Economics. She is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant “Peers and Possible Partners: Exploring the Origins of Population Long-term Equilibria” (P3OPLE). She is visiting CCPR in October-November 2023.

Drivers of Fertility: Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso (joint with Pascaline Dupas, Seema Jayachandran and Adriana Lleras-Muney)

Abstract:

We conducted a study among 14,545 households in rural Burkina Faso to test some of the leading explanations for persistently high fertility rates in West Africa. First, we reject the oft-cited explanation of limited access to contraception. Women in communities randomly assigned to have free access to medical contraception for three years did not have lower birth rates. Second, we cross-randomized additional interventions to test whether high desired fertility stems from incorrect or sticky beliefs and norms, specifically mis-perceptions about the child mortality rate, limited exposure to opposing views, and social pressure. None of these interventions, or combinations of them, had any detectable effect on realized fertility, desired fertility, or contraceptive use. Our results are consistent with couples personally benefiting from having a large family size and suggest that policies aimed at reducing fertility through family planning interventions may have only limited impact in such contexts.