Cash Transfers and Fertility: How the Introduction and Cancellation of a Child Benefit Affected Births and Abortions

• Authors: Libertad González.
• political economy
• Health Economics
• The Journal of Human Resources

We study the effects  of a universal child benefit on fertility in Spain  in  the 2000s  using  administrative, population-level  data, identifying  separately  the effects  driven  by  conceptions  and  abortions.  We  exploit  the  timing  of  the introduction  and  cancellation of the policy to infer when the effects on abortions and births can be expected.  We find that the introduction led to a 3  percent  increase, the  announcement of the cancellation to a transitory 4 percent increase, and  the cancellation to a 6  percent  decrease  in  birth rates.  We perform heterogeneity analysis and find suggestive evidence of both a timing (“tempo”) and a level effect  (“quantum”).