The Impact of Weather Shocks on Fertility in Rural India

Divya Pandey, University of Minnesota

The total fertility rate (TFR) in rural India has fallen by half in recent decades. In this paper, I look beyond the widely discussed factors of family planning programs and economic development to assess the role that negative weather shocks play in lowering the actual fertility as well as the desire for children in rural India. Utilizing a cohort of women in rural India who had their first birth between 2006 and 2016, my findings suggest that households respond to droughts by adjusting their fertility in the short term. I estimate treatment effects using Callaway and Sant’Anna’s (2021) difference-in-difference (DID) estimator and find that the average probability of birth to a woman shows a significant decline of about 0.8 percentage points following a drought, suggesting adjustment in fertility rates by following a weather-led adverse economic shock. I also find suggestive evidence that households in drought-prone areas have a preference for significantly smaller family sizes. This paper contributes to the broad literature on India’s demographic transition and the effects of droughts in its rural areas. Furthermore, by using Callaway and Sant’Anna’s (2021) methodology this paper extends the applications of the new literature on DID by attempting to answer a demography-centered question.

Keywords: Econometrics , Economic Demography, Population, Environment, and Climate Change, Fertility

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