Prankur Gupta
Prankur Gupta

PhD Candidate, Economics

Research

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Job Market Paper

You Want What You Get: The Effect of Realized Fertility on Fertility Preference
(link)

Abstract: Fertility preferences are critical in understanding fertility trends and in making reproductive policies. However, if fertility itself influences survey reports of preferences, then its usage in policy making gets complicated. This paper investigates whether there exists a causal effect of realized fertility on desired fertility. I exploit two separate sources of exogenous variation in realized fertility, robustly implementing two distinct identification strategies. The first uses the occurrence of twins while the second uses the birth of a female child at first birth to estimate the impact of realized fertility on desired fertility. Using data from 230 rounds of Demographic and Health Surveys from 74 developing countries, I find that having an additional birth causally increases desired fertility by 0.15-0.30. My main result is to identify this causal effect, but my data also allow me to investigate probable mechanism. I show that facts of timing rule out learning that could be consistent with a classical model of causally-prior preferences. Instead, supplementary evidence suggests a behavioral mechanism whereby outcomes influence stated preferences, which could be through reference-dependent preferences, ex-post rationalization, or another behavioral mechanism. The result has important policy and research implications specifically when using fertility preferences to estimate excess fertility, the need for family planning programs, son preference, or as proxies for intrahousehold bargaining.

Publications

Working Papers