Fertility Impacts of 3G Mobile Expansion: Evidence from Nigeria

Casey Breen, University of Texas, Austin
Till Koebe, Saarland University
Ridhi Kashyap , Oxford University

Diffusion theories of fertility transition have long emphasized the role of mass media technologies in spreading new ideas and norms, which in turn influence gender and demographic outcomes. The rapid expansion of the internet and mobile technologies creates novel channels for the diffusion of globalized norms and access to health and labor market resources, with the potential to shape fertility behaviors. Despite this theoretical potential, estimating the causal impacts of digital technology on fertility, especially in high-fertility contexts, has proven to be challenging because of the difficulty of disentangling selection into usage from true effects. Here, we construct a longitudinal panel by linking individual-level birth histories from the 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) to annual mobile coverage maps to estimate the causal effect of mobile broadband (3G and beyond) expansion on fertility. We use a two-way fixed effects model, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of 3G coverage rollout over time and space. We find that the expansion of 3G coverage during the study period led to a decline in fertility, corresponding to a 7% reduction in the annual probability of a woman having a birth.

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 Presented in Session 105. Fertility and Digital Technologies