Abstract
We posit that household decision-making over fertility is characterized by moral hazard since most contraception can only be perfectly observed by the woman. Using an experiment in Zambia that varied whether women were given access to contraceptives alone or with their husbands, we find that women given access with their husbands were 19 percent less likely to seek family planning services, 25 percent less likely to use concealable contraception, and 27 percent more likely to give birth. However, women given access to contraception alone report a lower subjective well-being, suggesting a psychosocial cost of making contraceptives more concealable. (JEL C78, D12, D82, I31, J13, J16, O15)
Highlights
In this subsection we briefly outline a variant of the conceptual framework presented in the main body that accounts for the fact that couples may use contraception so as to space births
We present a simple non-cooperative framework to model the intra-household bargaining over fertility decisions presented in the Conceptual Framework section
If we focus on this range of parameter values, we find that W ’s payoff is increasing in α while H’s is decreasing
Summary
In this subsection we briefly outline a variant of the conceptual framework presented in the main body that accounts for the fact that couples may use contraception so as to space births. Suppose further that the probability per period of having a child when not using contraception is equal to p. If the husband’s loss associated to not having a child is large enough, the pareto efficient decision for the couple is not to use contraception in the first period, even though both spouses agree that it is best to have a child in the second period than in the first. Whenever risk aversion is large enough, the risk of never having a child makes it pareto efficient for the couple to try and have a child from the first period onwards. This is true even though both spouses agree that it is best to have a child in the second period than in the first
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