Post-Migration Fertility Hazards

Eric R. Jensen, College of William and Mary
Dennis A. Ahlburg, University of Minnesota

Migration often is seen as operating on fertility through normative differences between origin and destination. A competing view is that for successful migrants, fertility decreases are attributable to increased opportunity cost of children. The two explanations are difficult to differentiate empirically, because women who move to more urbanized areas are likely to encounter both lower fertility norms and higher opportunity cost than in the origin state. We attempt to disentangle norms and opportunity costs using a model where conception hazards are contingent on past migration. We use DHS data from the Philippines that contains a large proportion of moves between equally urbanized areas, and so is well-suited to our task.