Females’ intra-household Bargaining Power and Fertility in Iran

This research investigates demand for child among Iranian urban households in an intra-household bargaining decision process. Using Household’s Expenditures Survey of Iran(2008), a count regression technique which takes into account the over-dispersion and under-dispersion characteristic of Poisson regression is specified as a function of intra-household bargaining factors, extra-household environmental factors, and family’s characteristics. Findings confirm the significance of extra-household environmental factorsand household’s characteristics in demand for child. Mothers with higher opportunity cost of child caring, more particularly college educated women, tend to have less children and they substitute quality of children for their quantity. As the Mothers’ bargaining power goes up, their propensity to bring more children decreases, however fathers with higher non-labor earning prefer to have more children. Diagnostic checking confirms accuracy and appropriateness of the Generalized Poisson against its alternatives. To examine the exogeneity of the explanatory variables we re-estimated the proposed specification with Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), where the hypothesis of exogeneity is confirmed. Further robustness checking by Negative Binomial distribution of dependent variable and specifying the models by mothers’ age disaggregation show that the sign and significance of estimated coefficients are similar to those of the Generalized Poisson and GMM; however modest changes have been experienced in the magnitude of estimated coefficients.