Children are a Poor Women’s Wealth: How Inheritance Rights Affect Fertility

Does improving widows’ inheritance rights have the potential to reduce fertility rates in Sub-Saharan Africa? This paper exploits a natural experiment in Namibia to identify the causal impact of a reform implemented in 2008 that improved widow’s inheritance rights on fertility behaviors. I combine pre-reform variations in customary inheritance laws across traditional authorities with time variation, using a difference-in-differences strategy. The results indicate that the reform led to a 24% decrease in the annual birth rate, equivalent to a reduction of one child over a woman’s reproductive life. Additionally, the reform delayed the age at first birth by 5.5 months. I find suggestive evidence that women had more children and at an earlier age as a mitigating strategy against the prevalent risk of dispossession in widowhood. In contexts where the widowhood risk may materialize at a young age due to large age gap between partners and to women’s longer life expectancy, women anticipate the need to have a financially independent child by their 40’s. These findings suggest that protecting widows’ inheritance rights could be a novel, low-cost policy lever to reduce fertility rates and delay early childbearing, addressing major development challenges in the subcontinent.