Fertility and financial development: an analysis of Indian households.

In this paper, we examine the relationship between fertility and financial development using the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) data for the year 2015–2016. We examine the old-age security hypothesis to explain fertility rates amongst Indian women using bank access as a proxy for financial development. As far as we know this paper is the first to look at this relationship the case of India using a quantile count regression. We find that there is a differential effect of access to a bank account on fertility rates amongst Indian women. We find that access to bank accounts increase fertility for the lower conditional quantiles but decreases fertility at the higher conditional quantiles. This study also reiterates that fertility decreases with an increase in education, wealthindex, urbanization and labour participation of women. Financial access has a We also find that infant mortality and age increase fertility rates. The results have some important policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]