Brown Bag seminar in Economics | Celine Zipfel

Sub-Saharan Africa’s unique fertility transition is widely documented. However, its underlying causes are less well understood. We study whether female wage employment opportunities – particularly scarce across the region – can affect women’s fertility choices. Focusing on the rapid expansion of Kenya’s cut-flower industry, which provides stable wage jobs and disproportionately hires women, we exploit the staggered arrival of flower farms across rural Kenya as a natural experiment. We construct a novel measure of flower farm expansion using satellite imagery to identify greenhouse locations associated with cut-flower production, which we then merge with geo-referenced census data. Preliminary results suggest that the arrival of a flower greenhouse in a rural location significantly increases the share of women working for wages; this is associated with a decline in birth rates. Ongoing work is focusing on refining the identification strategy and testing the robustness of these findings.