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Modelling the impact of women’s education on fertility in Malawi

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Abstract

Many studies have suggested that there is an inverse relationship between education and number of children among women from sub-Saharan Africa countries, including Malawi. However, a crucial limitation of these analyses is that they do not control for the potential endogeneity of education. The aim of our study is to estimate the role of women’s education on their number of children in Malawi, accounting for the possible presence of endogeneity and for nonlinear effects of continuous observed confounders. Our analysis is based on micro data from the 2010 Malawi Demographic Health Survey, and uses a flexible instrumental variable regression approach. The results suggest that the relationship of interest is affected by endogeneity and exhibits an inverted U-shape among women living in rural areas of Malawi, whereas it exhibits an inverse (nonlinear) relationship for women living in urban areas.

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Notes

  1. As a non-exhaustive list of policies, we can cite (a) compulsory primary education, (b) investment and improvements in the quality of the school infrastructure, (c) efforts to balance the teacher-student ratio, and (d) support for the purchase of school supplies for students and teachers (e.g. textbooks, pens, pencils).

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to MEASURE DHS for having granted us permission to use the 2010 Malawi DHS data. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for many suggestions which stimulated us to conduct further analyses and helped to improve the presentation and quality of the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Prometeia, G. Marconi, Bologna, 40122, Italy

    Luca Zanin

  2. Department of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HX, UK

    Rosalba Radice

  3. Department of Statistical Science, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Giampiero Marra

Authors
  1. Luca Zanin
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  2. Rosalba Radice
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  3. Giampiero Marra
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Luca Zanin.

Additional information

Responsible editor: Junsen Zhang

Appendix

Appendix

For the sake of completeness, we report below the estimation results that indicate the parametric (Table 3) and nonlinear (Fig. 6) effects for first-stage model (5).

Table 3 Estimated parametric effects for model (5)
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Fig. 6
figure 6

Estimated nonlinear effects on the scale of the linear predictor for the continuous covariate age included in model (5); 95 % confidence intervals are represented by dashed lines. The rug plot, at the bottom of each graph, shows the covariate values

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Table 4 Estimated nonlinear effects on the scale of the linear predictor for the continuous covariate education when the naive (??) and 2SGAM (??) models are used
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Zanin, L., Radice, R. & Marra, G. Modelling the impact of women’s education on fertility in Malawi. J Popul Econ 28, 89–111 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-013-0502-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-013-0502-8

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