Television and fertility: evidence from a natural experiment

Abstract

In this paper, we study the effect of television exposure on fertility. We exploit a natural experiment that took place in Germany after WWII. For topographical reasons, Western TV programs, which promoted one/no child families, could not be received in certain parts of East Germany. We find robust evidence that access to West German TV results in lower fertility. This conclusion is robust to alternative model specifications and different data sets. Using individual level information on TV consumption, we employ IV techniques to estimate the direct effect of Western TV consumption on fertility. By using aggregate level fertility data, we furthermore show the robustness of our analysis in a difference-in-difference setting. Our results suggest that individual fertility decisions are affected by role models or information about other ways of life promoted by media.

Turning the Tide: A Value-Laden Proposition

“…The idea of TV and the internet affecting family behavior is reasonable, as research from Brazil (La Ferrara, Chong, and Duryea 2012) to East Germany (Bönisch and Hyll 2023) and China has shown (Zhang et al 2023). This follows classic research in Nepal that showed women were more likely to delay marriage if they lived near movie theaters, plausible conduits for modern cultural influence (Yabiku 2004).…”

Stories in Action

“…Moreover, the rise of Fox News is estimated to have led between 5% and 30% of non-Republican voters to switch their support to George W. Bush in the 2000 election ( DellaVigna & Kaplan, 2007 ). Outside of the United States, exposure to West German television resulted in people in East Germany reducing their fertility rate, developing higher aspirations, and developing preferences for Western goods ( Bönisch & Hyll, 2023 ; Bursztyn & Cantoni, 2016 ; Hyll & Schneider, 2013 ). Television also changed people’s core beliefs.…”

“…Political theorists emphasize that collective action is hard because individual decision-makers must make group-level choices about public matters (R. Hardin, 1982), in which people often have competing interests and often do not know what others believe or want. Social scientists and psychologists have long emphasized the role that stories play in collective action-driving the formation and dynamics of nations (Tilly, 2002), religions (Dunbar, 2022), hunter-gatherer communities (D. Smith et al, 2017;Sugiyama, 2001), organizations (Boje, 2008), cultural groups (Michalopoulos & Xue, 2021), and even financial markets (Shiller, 2017).…”

Universal Solvent or catch-all Proxy? : Causal Evidence on the Effect of Education on Political Participation and Attitudes in Germany

“…German regions were built close to the inner German border in West Germany. This identification strategy has been first set up by Bursztyn and Cantoni (2016) and has then been extensively used in the literature (for instance Hennighausen (2015), Friehe et al (2018) or Bönisch and Hyll (2015)). The empirical evidence we present documents that the effects we find in our main analysis (where we compare East against West Germans) double or even triple in magnitude if we compare West Germans with East Germans that did not have any access to West TV.…”

“…West TV (Bursztyn and Cantoni (2016)) 7 . From this, a large literature followed this identification strategy and showed that East Germans with access to West TV are more likely to believe that effort rather than luck determines success in life (Hennighausen (2015)), are less likely to vote for right-wing parties (Hornuf et al (2020)), show lower levels of fertility (Bönisch and Hyll (2015)), a higher probability to become entrepreneurs (Slavtchev and Wyrwich (2017)) and higher levels of consumption aspirations (Hyll and Schneider (2013)). At the regional level, East German regions with access to West TV display lower rates of violent crime and sex crime, but more fraud (Friehe et al (2018)) and, similar to findings at the individual level, have lower vote shares for the extreme left and right-wing parties ).…”