Education and Contraceptive Choice: A Conditional Demand Framework

Abstract

A multiperiod model of fertility and contraceptive choice which considers unobserved differential preferences for the timing of births is formulated. Conventional and conditional demand equations for contraceptives are derived from the model and the relationships in each between female education birth intentions and the level of contraceptive efficiency are compared. Demand equations derived from the model conditioned on birth intentions were shown to be superior to conventional demand equations in testing some of the assumptions pertaining to the technology of contraceptives embedded in the utility-maximization framework. A weak test of the hypothesis that education lowers the (fixed) costs of information associated with new technologies as exemplified by the oral contraceptive was shown to be obtainable only from consistent estimates of conditional contraceptive choice demand parameters. As a consequence of the dual technological attributes of contraceptive methods if education affects both the costs of children and preference orderings over the spacing of births the education-contraceptive use association conditional on the number of intended children cannot be used to make welfare comparisons across households. The log-linear model in which contraceptives were categorized on the basis of their cost characteristics and simulatenous equations techniques were used to obtain estimates of the conditional demand equations for contraceptives based on data from the National Fertility Survey (1970). Estimates indicated that the education of the wife among households with identical fertility plans was significantly and positively associated with the adoption of the newer birth control methods in 1970 with quantitiative affects significantly greater than those indicated in reduced-form and inconsistently estimated conditional equations appearing in a priori studies. The results support the hypothesis that the relative magnitudes of fixed and variable contraceptive costs influence contraceptive decisions with the value of the wifes time an important component of the former and suggest that women with higher levels of education are more likely to use traditional contraceptive methods.