Journal Article

Family planning in a life-cycle model with income risk

Authors

Publication date

Aug 2020

Summary

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.

Published in

Journal of Applied Econometrics

Volume and page numbers

35 , 567 -586

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1002/jae.2766

ISSN

16

Subjects

Childbearing: Fertility, Income Dynamics, and Household Economics

Links

University of Essex, Albert Sloman Library Periodicals *restricted to University of Essex registered users* - https://lib.essex.ac.uk/iii/encore/record/C__Rb1609785

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