THREE ESSAYS ON FERTILITY BEHAVIOR AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

Wenjun Wu

doi:10.7273/000003349

This dissertation contains three distinct papers on fertility behavior and domestic violence. Chapter one examines the effectiveness of the policy on fertility, proportion of male children, and female infant mortality. We utilize data from the fourth round of the National Family Health Survey (2015-2016) and use propensity score matching models to examine whether the policy influences household fertility behavior. First, fertility behavior of women residing in the policy states who married before the mandate are compared to those who married after the mandate implementation. Second, fertility behavior of women residing in the policy states are compared to those living in non-policy states. While the policy is found to lower the number of children in a household, there is no significant change in the proportion of male children in a household or in female infant mortality. However, pre-policy absence of a male child is positively and statistically significantly associated with excess fertility.Chapter two examines inconsistencies between an individual’s expectations regarding an ideal number of children and their current desire for children. The results show that societal influence does affect an individual’s fertility decision-making process and that knowledge of modern contraceptive methods has a significant impact on both spouses’ inconsistency between ideal and current desire for children. Inconsistency is significantly associated with number of children and proportion of male children in family. However, causal pathways between inconsistency and fertility outcomes may not be established using cross-sectional data and when implementing OLS estimation. Chapter three studies the causal effect of acceptance of domestic violence on actual physical and sexual abuse incidence. Both spouses’ attitudes toward the issue are analyzed. Results indicate that both husband and wife’s attitudes toward the issue are positively and significantly associated with domestic violence incidence. However, results from the IV estimation indicates only wife’s attitude have positive causal effect on husband’s abuse behavior in rural area. I also find that there is a high rate of cross generational transmission of attitudes towards domestic violence from results of the first stage regressions of the IV probit model. The results are in general consistent across different income and caste and religion groups.

THREE ESSAYS ON FERTILITY BEHAVIOR AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

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