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This paper provides new evidence that family planning programs are associated with a decrease in the share of children and adults living in poverty. Our research design exploits the county roll-out of U.S. family planning programs in the late 1960s and early 1970s and examines their relationship with poverty rates in the short and longer-term in public census data. We find that cohorts born after federal family planning programs began were less likely to live in poverty in childhood and that these same cohorts were less likely to live in poverty as adults.

This paper uses dozens of large-scale household surveys to measure average changes in fertility following hundreds of droughts, floods, earthquakes, tropical cyclones, other storms, and epidemics in Africa between 1980 and 2016. Droughts are the largest and longest-lasting type of disaster on average, and fertility decreases by between 3.5 and 6.8 percent in the five years after droughts. Fertility changes are smaller or less clear after other types of disasters. Comparisons between countries, rather than within countries, drive these findings. There is substantial geographic heterogeneity in the direction and magnitude of the changes in fertility after disasters, driven by characteristics of the disasters and survey respondents. Fertility decreases especially after more recent droughts and in areas prone to drought. Fertility also decreases after longer floods. Fertility decreases after epidemics for women near the start and end of their childbearing careers, but increases for women in their late twenties and early thirties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On average, childless women observed by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics report that they intend to have more children than they actually have. A collection of intentions that record only whether respondents intend to have another child can more accurately predict the number of children they have. Errors in the formation of intentions are not required to explain this finding. Rather, if intentions record a survey respondent's most likely predicted number of children, then the average of these intentions does not necessarily equal average actual fertility, even if intentions are formed using rational expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the apartheid era, all South Africans were formally classified as white, African, colored, or Asian. Starting in 1970, the government directly provided free family planning services to residents of townships and white-owned farms. Relative to African residents of other regions of the country, the share of African women that gave birth in these townships and white-owned farms declined by nearly one-third during the 1970s. Deferral of childbearing into the 1980s partially explains the decline, but lifetime fertility fell by one child per woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]