Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name:  Conzo, Pierluigi
Author-Email: pierluigi.conzo@@unito.it 
Author-Name:  Fuochi, Giulia
Author-Email: giulia.fuochi@carloalberto.org
Author-Name:  Mencarini,Letizia
Author-Email: letizia.mencarini@unito.it
Author-Workplace-Name: University of Turin
Author-Workplace-Homepage: http://www.est.unito.it/
Title:Fertility and Life Satisfaction in Rural Ethiopia.
Abstract: There is a growing number of studies focusing on the role of fertility in subjective well-being in
developed countries while developing countries have been rarely taken into account. We investigate
the empirical relationship between fertility and life satisfaction in rural Ethiopia, the largest
landlocked country in Africa providing the unique opportunity of panel data availability. Our results
suggest that older men benefit the most in terms of life satisfaction from the investment in children,
the latter being instead detrimental for women’s subjective well being in reproductive age. In
particular, consistently with the related socio-economic theories, we find that the number of
children ever born plays a positive role for men’s life satisfaction in older age. Conversely, a new
birth produces the opposite effect especially for young women. We argue that this mismatch has
two complementary explanations: on the one hand, rather than a source of (labour) support young
children represent a burden which traditionally falls on women’s shoulders in the short run; on the
other hand, in poor rural areas children can be thought as a valuable long-term investment in a lifecycle
perspective. Endogeneity issues are addressed by controlling for lagged life satisfaction in
OLS regressions, through fixed effects and the IV approach.
Length: 27 pages
Creation-Date: 2015-06
File-URL: http://www.est.unito.it/do/home.pl/Download?doc=/allegati/wp2015dip/wp_24_2015.pdf
File-Format: Application/PDF
Handle: RePEc:uto:dipeco:201524