Age at First Child: Does Education Delay Fertility Timing? The Case of Kenya.

Completing additional years of education necessarily entails spending more time in school. There is naturally a rather mechanical effect of schooling on fertility if women tend not to have children while continuing to attend high school or college, thus delaying the beginning of and shortening their reproductive life. We use data from the Kenyan DHS surveys of 1989, 1993, 1998 and 2003 to uncover the impact of staying one more year in school on teenage fertility. To get around the endogeneity issue between schooling and fertility preferences, we use the 1985 Kenyan education reform as an instrument for years of education. We find that increasing the age at which students graduate from secondary school (from 17 to 18) decreased by 8 percentage points the probability that a girl with at least completed secondary education get pregnant before age 19. Moreover, we find that, for this group of girls, one more year spent in school entails a postponing of 7.5 months of the first pregnancy. These results (robust to a wide array of specifications) are of crucial interest to policy and decision makers who set up health and educational policies, as we show that investing in education can have positive spill-overs on health. JEL Classification: J13, I20