Contraception and Fertility: Household Production Under Uncertainty

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES CONTRACEPTION AND FERTILITY: HOUSEHOLDPRODUCTION UNDER UNCERTAINTY Robert T. iichael and Robert J. Willis Working Paper No. 21. CENTER FOR ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF II1ThAN BEHAVIOR AND SOCIALINSTITUTIONS NationalBureau of Economic Research, Inc. 261 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 December, 1973 Preliminary; Not for Quotation NBER working papers are distributed informally and in limited number for coimnents only. They should not be quoted without written permission. This report has not undergone the review accorded official NBER publications; in particular., It has not yet been submitted for approval by the Board of Directors. I CONTRACEPTION AND FERTILITY: HOUSEHOLDPRODUCTION UNDERUNCERTAINTY Robert T. Michael and Robert J. Willis Table of Contents I Introduction 1 II The Analytical Framework 8 III i. Birth control and the distribution of fertility outcomes 9 ii. Benefits of fertility control 17 iii. Costs of fertility control 25 iv. Optimal fertility control strategy 32 IV Pure and Mixed Contraceptive Strategies 35 V Contraception and Fertility Out- comes 41 VI The Diffusion of the Pill 59 November 1973 This study has been supported by a population economics program grant to the NBER from the National Institute of Child Healthand Human Development, PHS, Department of HEW. This paper is not an official NBER publication since it has not been reviewed by the NBER Board of Directors. We want to thank Lee A. Lillard for useful suggestions and C. Ates Dagli, Kathleen V. McNally and Joan Robinson for their careful research assis- tance. This paper was prepared for presentation at a November 1973 NBER Conferenée on Research in Income nd Wealth and is forthcoming in hold Production and Consumption, NBER Income and Wealth Conference Volume. S IIntroduction Over the past century fertility behaviorin the United States has undergone profound changes. Measuredby cohort fertility the average number of children per married woman has declinedfrom about 55 children at the time of the CivilWar to 2.4 children at the time of the Great Depression. it is seldomemphasized however that an even greater relative change took place in the dispersion offertility a— mong these women: the percentage of women with,say, seven or more children declined from 36% to under 6%,1While students of population have offered reasonably convincing explanations for the decline in fertility over time, they have not succeeded inexplaining the fluc- tuationsin the trendand have madesurprisingly little effort to ex- plain the large and systematic decline in thedispersion of fertility over time. In this paper we attempt to studycontraception behavior and its effects on fertility. One of the effectson which we focus considerab]e attention is the dispersionor variance in fertility. Our analysis is applied to cross—sectional databut it also provides an explanation for the decline in the variance offertility over time. 1These figuresare taken from the report of the President's Commission on Population Growth and the AmericanFuture (see Taeuber 1972). They are indicated below in Table I—i. S S Thestudy of fertility behavior has received increasing attention by economists in the past few years. Much of this analysis has been conducted in the context of the new theory of consumer behavior pioneered by Becker (1965) and Lancaster (1966). The work on fertility behavior complements many other studies dealing with aspects of household production. One of the specific topics in the fertility literature has been the relationship between child bearing and several life cycle production decisions such as marriage, schooling, women's career choices, life cycle time and money allocations and so forth. A second and related topic of the economics of fertility behavior is the tradeoff in household production between the family's number of children and the expenditure of resources per child, particularly the expenditure of time devoted to children at the pre—school age. A third focus of this research has been the fertility demand function—— the form and stability over time and across groups of the household's demand function for children.2 Nearly all of these studies of household fertility behavior as- sume that the household can produce exactly the number of children it wants, costlessly and with certainty. We have previously pointed out that costly fertility control operates as a subsidy to child bearing, 2For a thorough model of fertility demand and the quantity— quality trade—off s in the context of a static framework see Willis (1973). For an extensive set of papers pertaining to topics in fertility behavior see the two NBER conference volumes New Economic Approaches to Fertility and Marriage, Family Human Capital and tility, Schultz (ed.) (1973) and (1974). These volumes indicate, we think, that much of observed fertility behavior is amenable to eco— nomic analysis. lowerimg the marginal cost of having additional children (see Willis 1971) and we have suggested a framework for analyzing the household's fertility control decisions (see MIchael1973). In this paper we con- sider the household's fertility control behaviorboth in terms of the selection of specific fertility controlstrategies (the costs and benefits of specific contraceptive techniques) and in terms of the effects of different controlstrategies on household fertility. Onecould introduce fertility control costsinto.adetejnjgj model of fertility behavior bytreating these costs as transaction costs associated with acquiringany given level of fertility. In this framework, the household can selectany number of children with certainty provided it pays the requisite costs offertility control. As— sinning that total fertility control costsare larger the smaller the number of children chosen, the positive marginal cost of fertility control raises average fertility byacting as a subsidy to childbearing. In this paper, we have treated the costs of fertility control in a somewhat different framework. We haveadopted a model in which the household can select with certainty any particular monthly probability of conception,3 but in which the household'sactual fertility, N, is a stochastic variable. By selecting andproducing a particular monthly 3Theprobability is bounded by zero add by the probability im- plied by natural or intrinsic fecundability,say, a probability of about 0.2 per month. S I probability of conception, the household selects a distribution of fertility outcomes. The mean ofthat distribution is its expected fertility; its varianceindicates the uncertainty that the house— hold faces. As Table I—i indicates, the decline in average fertility Table I—i Mean NumberofChildren and Frequency Distribution by NumberofChildren for Selected Cohorts from 1835—1930 for Ever—Married Women Mean PercentDistribution No. of 0 1—2 3—4 5—6 7 Cohort Children ChildrenChildrenChildrenChildrenChildren 1835—39 5.40 7.7 17.3 20.0 18.7 36.3 1845—49 5.27 8.2 18.5 20.3 18.3 34.8 1855—59 4.97 8.9 20.6 21.3 17.9 31.3 1865—69 3.90 12.3 26.6 26.1 16.0 18.9 1875—79 3.46 15.0 30.4 25.2 14.4 15.0 1885—89 3.15 16.6 33.1 25.1 13.1 12.2 1895—99 2.71 18.6 39.0 23.9 10.0 8.4 1905—09 2.36 20.8 43.2 22.4 7.8 5.9 1915—19 2.60 13.9 43.7 28.1 8.9 5.4 1926—30 3.08 8.0 36.5 36.2 12.3 7.0 Source: Taeuber 1972 (with theexception of the most recentcohort the women were at least age 45at the time of the enumeration; for the 1926—30 cohort the women were age 40—44 at the time of the survey.) over the past century has been accompanied by a significant reduction in the dispersion of fertility. The stochastic model of fertility con+ trol which we discuss in the following section emphasizes the relationship between the mean and variance of fertility and offers an explanation for the observed decline in the disperàton in fertility over . time. Child rearing is an exceptionally costly activity, both interms of direct dollar outlays andforgone time and human capital.,4 Probably few events in one's lifetime affect subsequent behaviormore exten- sively than having a child. While other important life cycle decisions such as marriage and career choiceare subject to considerable uncer— tainty, the uncertainty generally pertainsto the quality or the char- acteristics of the object of choice. Uncertainty about the charac- teristics of the prospective child also exist of course, but in addi- tion there exists the uncertainty which we are emphasizing__uncertainty about the acquisition of a childitself. At the individual household level this uncertainty about thenum- ber of children affects at least three aspects of behavior.First, it mayaffect decisions about the expenditures ofresources on exist— Ing. children——if ordinary substitutionbetween quantity and quality is relevant to children, then not knowing the final number of children may affectthe household's expenditure decisionson its first—born children. Second, there exists Sbtitti0 between expenditureson 4For estimatesof the direct costs of children Reed and McIntosh (1972). Lindert see Cain (1971) or (1973) presents a useful discussion of existing evidence on variousaspects of the costs of children. Michael and Lazear (1971) emphasize thepotenttal cost of children in terms of forgone human capital and Mincer and Polachek (1974)estimate the de- preciation in the mother's human capital relatedto her noninarket child rearing activity. children and on other household goods and *eriiceBandalso between expenditures over time. So uncertainty about the number of children, and about the timing or spacing of children, can be expected to affectthe composition and timing of consumer expenditure and savings behavior.Third, because of important interactions with other household production and with the relative value of family member's time, uncertainty about the number of children may have effects on the parents' occupation choices, schooling decisions and general orientation toward market and household activities.

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