Education, health, and fertility: analysing interactions across countries and over time

This thesis focuses on the association between education and two demographic outcomes, health and fertility. It consists of 4 chapters. In Chapter 1, I explore the relationship between health and education and assess how it changes depending on the characteristics of the countries concerned. Using macro panel estimation techniques, I find that the link between education and health is strongest in underdeveloped countries, and weakens as countries develop. This suggests that increasing basic education and promoting the adoption of healthy habits, could lead to large health improvements in underdeveloped settings.Chapters 2 to 4 focus on Educational Fertility Differentials (FDs), a concept that measures fertility differences across women of different education levels. Empirical evidence on FD trends in developing countries is mixed: while some argue that FDs narrow as countries develop, others claim that they remain wide as development unfolds. Chapter 2 proposes a new measure of FD, defined as the average education level of new mothers, minus the average education level of all women of reproductive age, to asses which of these scenarios is supported by the data. I show that negative FDs in developing countries follow a U-shape as countries evolve. The negative association between education and fertility is weak at early stages of development, gets stronger as education levels improve, and weakens again as development advances.In Chapter 3, I explore the determinants of these trends, explicitly considering the role of cultural and social variables, which have been overlooked by the empirical analysis so far. I find that they play a critical role in explaining the FD trends found in Chapter 2.Chapter 4 assesses if an increase in women’s reproductive knowledge could narrow FDs. I show that on average the impact of an increase of knowledge on FDs is small. The analysis further highlights the role of cultural factors, as it shows that when moral barriers are major impediments for the adoption of contraception, the effectiveness of policies that focus on increasing women's reproductive knowledge is limited. On the contrary, in countries where the lack of knowledge or access to birth control methods is among the main reasons behind low rates of contraception use, these policies could be highly effective