Do Financial Incentives Increase Fertility?

Do child subsidy programmes lead to a higher birth rate? Rajeev Dehejia has explored this issue using a panel data set of over 300,000 Israeli women during the period 1999–2005, with comprehensive information on their fertility histories, education, religious affiliation, ethnicity and income. He has discovered a positive, statistically significant, and economically meaningful price effect on fertility. This positive effect is strongest for households in the lower range of the income distribution, weakens with income and is present in all religious and ethnic subgroups. There is also a significant price effect on fertility among women who are close to the end of their lifetime fertility, suggesting that at least part of the effect is due to a reduction in total fertility.

Rajeev Dehejia's research spans econometrics, development economics, labour economics and public economics, with a focus on empirical microeconomic policy research. A recurring theme in his research is a household's response to uncertainty, with a focus on issues of child labour, micro finance enterprises and fertility decisions. Other research interests include: econometric methods for program evaluation, in particular matching and propensity score methods; financial development and growth; moral hazard and automobile insurance; and religion and consumption insurance.

Mr Dehejia's articles have appeared in The Journal of Law and Economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Econometrics, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, and Economic Development and Cultural Change. He is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research, ITA and CESifo. He is a coeditor of the Journal of Human Resources, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics and a past associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association: Case Studies and Applications.

Rajeev Dehejia received his PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 1997. He is on the faculty of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, and was previously on the faculty of the Department of Economics and the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and of the Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. Visiting positions he has held include Harvard, Princeton and the London School of Economics.