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Title: Fertility, Child Health, and the Diffusion of Electricity into the Home

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2012

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Abstract: This paper studies how advances in home production technologies affect fertility and child health. The analysis focuses on the period 1930 to 1960, when electricity and a host of new consumer durables diffused rapidly into most American homes. I relate changes in the proportion of households with electricity and modern appliances to changes in fertility and infant mortality rates, exploiting substantial cross-county and cross-state variation in the timing of when households acquired these new goods. The fact that the decision to purchase a modern appliance may have been correlated with unobservable family characteristics creates a challenging identification problem, which I address using instruments created from a new dataset that provides information on the construction of over 1600 new power plants between 1930 and 1960. Identification relies on plausibly exogenous changes in the cost of supplying power to different communities based on their location. I find that modern household technologies led families to make a child quantity-quality tradeoff favouring quality: modern appliances were associated with decreases in infant mortality and decreases in fertility. I show that the declines in infant mortality were particularly large in states that relied heavily on coalfor heating and cooking, consistent with modern stoves reducing indoor air pollution directly. Health improvements were also larger in states that had previously invested heavily in maternal education, suggesting that household modernization also led parents to provide better infant care. The results do not appear to have been driven by local economic development, cross-county migration, or changes in the quality of local health care. Overall, the diffusion of electricity into the home can account for between 25% and 30% of the decline in infant mortality during this period. The paper has implications for current policy, given that over 1.6 billion people worldwide still do not have access to electricity. In particular, the analysis suggests that there is considerable scope for new o -grid electrification programs to improve child health in the developing world.

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Authors: Lewis, Joshua

Publisher: University of Toronto

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Family and Marriage, Fertility and Mortality, Other

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