The Long Reach of Fertility Limitation: Human Capital Formation across Decades

Alberto Palloni, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jenna Nobles, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ian Coxhead, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Lia Fernald, University of California, Berkeley
Stephanie Koning, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Expansions in family planning and female education play a critical role in reducing family size and improving early-life conditions for children. Given growing evidence about the importance of these early-life conditions for development trajectories, fertility change likely has a more enduring legacy. We test this using longitudinal data that facilitates the study of human capital formation in Indonesian birth cohorts spanning three decades. We develop specifications that identify, in turn, the effects of family planning expansions on fertility outcomes, on early-life measures of physical health, on trajectories of cognitive development and linear growth, and finally on completed education and adult height. We generate a series of macrosimulations that link these equations and introduce variation in the parameter estimates given assumptions about macroeconomic change. In doing so, we generate a plausible range of values taken by the influence of fertility decline on human capital attainment in contemporary cohorts of Indonesian adults.