Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil

Ferrara, Eliana La; Chong, Alberto; Duryea, Suzanne

doi:10.1257/app.4.4.1

Cited by 581 publications

(186 citation statements)

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“…Evidence from India, Indonesia, and Brazil suggests that increased exposure to television is associated with significant increases in modern contraceptive use and decreases in pregnancy (Dewi et al 2013;La Ferrara et al 2012;Jensen and Oster 2009).…”

Section: Schooling Fertility Preferences and Fertility Declinementioning

confidence: 99%

Does Schooling Affect Women’s Desired Fertility? Evidence From Malawi, Uganda, and Ethiopia

Behrman

2015

Demography

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Demographic scholarship suggests that schooling plays an important role in transforming fertility preferences in the early stages of fertility decline. However, there is limited evidence on the relationship between schooling and fertility preferences that addresses the endogeneity of schooling. I use the implementation of Universal Primary Education (UPE) policies in Malawi, Uganda, and Ethiopia in the mid-1990s to conduct a fuzzy regression discontinuity analysis of the effect of schooling on women's desired fertility. Findings indicate that increased schooling reduced women's ideal family size and very high desired fertility across all three countries. Additional analyses of potential pathways through which schooling could have affected desired fertility suggest some pathways--such as increasing partner's education--were common across contexts, whereas other pathways were country-specific. This analysis contributes to demographic understandings of the factors influencing individual-level fertility behaviors and thus aggregate-level fertility decline in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Section: Schooling Fertility Preferences and Fertility Declinementioning

confidence: 99%

Does Schooling Affect Women’s Desired Fertility? Evidence From Malawi, Uganda, and Ethiopia

Behrman

2015

Demography

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“…Although our results are not directly comparable to those studies due to the different measure of fertility, we find evidence that the effect in Indonesia is relatively large. In Brazil, the entry of a highly popular television channel reduces the average number of children among childbearing women by only about 0.03 children (La Ferrara et al, 2012). Similarly, the entry of cable television in India reduces the probability for a woman to become pregnant by four percentage points (Jensen & Oster, 2009).…”

Section: The Impact Of Television On Fertilit Ymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, the most likely mechanism by which television affects fertility is through the broadcast content. 4 In Brazil, La Ferrara et al (2012) argue that the content, rather than the activity of watching television, is the main mechanism. They come to this conclusion after finding that children born after the entry of RedeGlobo have a higher probability of being named after a soap opera character.…”

Section: Mechanismsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To our knowledge, there are only two studies in the literature that investigate this issue. La Ferrara, Chong, and Duryea (2012) use the Brazilian census and find that the entry of RedeGlobo, a television network that specializes in soap opera, is associated with fewer children. In addition, since the children born after the entry of RedeGlobo were more likely to be named after characters in the soap opera, the authors argue that the content, rather than the act of watching television, is responsible for the observed reduction in fertility.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to looking at the effect of television on fertility in a third developing country, this article differs from the two studies above in that we construct our dependent variable such that it more closely resembles the widely used measure of fertility: crude birth rate. In contrast, La Ferrara et al (2012) use the average number of live births among women aged 15-49, while Jensen and Oster (2009) use the probability of pregnancy. In addition, the longitudinal dataset that we use contains more data points for each panel observation.…”

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confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The impact of media on behaviour: Evidence from television coverage expansion and declining fertility in Indonesia

Dewi¹,

Suryadarma²,

Suryahadi³

2017

Development Policy Review

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The media is increasingly recognized as playing an important role in affecting the behaviour of individuals. In this article, we examine the effect of an expansion of private television broadcast on fertility in Indonesia. Our district fixed effects estimation results show that increasing the share of population with access to private television by one‐standard deviation—from a 78% coverage to a universal coverage—reduces crude birth rate by 6.2%, equivalent to 190,000 fewer births. We find evidence that television causes an increase in the use of modern contraceptives, but no change in the use of traditional contraceptives. The finding that expanding television coverage increases the demand for modern contraceptives shows that policy‐makers need to ensure that modern contraceptive is easily accessible.

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Experiment, Natural

Almond¹

2017

The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods

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Natural experiments are a specific type of experimental methodology used when a treatment variable is varied through an event that is exogenous to the outcome variable. The natural experiment is similar to both the laboratory and field experiment as well as observational studies, but differs in a few key areas including replicability, control, and ecological validity. This entry aims to provide support for the use of natural experiments in communication research.

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Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil

Cited by 581 publications

References 20 publications

Does Schooling Affect Women’s Desired Fertility? Evidence From Malawi, Uganda, and Ethiopia

Does Schooling Affect Women’s Desired Fertility? Evidence From Malawi, Uganda, and Ethiopia

The impact of media on behaviour: Evidence from television coverage expansion and declining fertility in Indonesia

Experiment, Natural

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