Social norms and the fertility transition

This paper provides a norm-based explanation for two features of the fertility transition that have been observed in many different settings: the slow response to external interventions and the wide variation in the response to the same intervention. Most societies have traditionally put norms into place to regulate fertility. When the economic environment changes, individuals gradually learn through their social interactions about the new reproductive equilibrium that will emerge in their community. This characterization of the fertility transition as a process of changing social norms is applied to rural Bangladesh, where norms are organized at the level of the religious group and interactions rarely cross religious boundaries. Consistent with the view that changing social norms are driving changes in reproductive behavior in these communities, we find that the individual's contraception decision responds strongly to changes in contraceptive prevalence in her own religious group within the village whereas cross-religion effects are entirely absent. Local changes in reproductive behavior occur independently across religious groups despite the fact that all individuals in the village have access to the same family planning inputs.