Social Network Contagion in Refugees' Fertility in Germany

Chiara Guasti , European University Institute

In this paper, I study how refugees’ fertility is affected by their social networks after settlement. The literature on immigrants’ reproductive behavior has primarily focused on micro- and macro-sources of heterogeneity in childbearing outcomes — such as individual factors or the socioeconomic context at destination — disregarding the meso-level of social interactions. Moreover, less theoretical attention has been paid to refugees, whose specific migration drivers and legal frameworks can also affect their fertility incentives. Therefore, I seek to contribute to this literature both theoretically — focusing on forcibly displaced people in Germany and their networks’ influence on fertility — and methodologically. Most research on immigrants’ reproductive behavior is correlational; existing networks often drive settlement decisions, leading to a selectivity bias. However, using the IAB-BAMF-SOEP survey, I can restrict the analysis to refugees from high-fertility countries subject to the German dispersal policy. Upon arrival in Germany, refugees are randomly allocated across counties through a binding quota system. I consider this a quasi-random variation in their social opportunity structure and use it as a proxy for social networks. I examine how characteristics of refugees’ randomized networks in their county of residence — specifically, the size of the co-ethnic population — influence their fertility behavior. I expect to find that refugees living in counties with larger co-ethnic networks have higher probabilities of parenthood than those living in counties where they are more likely to interact with natives; co-ethnic networks should strengthen the diffusion of traditional norms valuing motherhood and childbearing, thereby incentivizing fertility.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 4. Fertility, Diversity and Migration