Essays on the contextual determinants of demographic processes and family dynamics

Abstract

This thesis consists of three self-contained articles studying whether and how different social contexts shape population and family dynamics. In the first article, I retest the Trivers–Willard hypothesis, which argues for a negative correlation between maternal stress and sex ratio at birth (SRB), with 243 years of time series data from Sweden. I find no supportive evidence for the hypothesis because the associations of SRB with most of the covariates used as proxies for maternal stress are not statistically significant, and in many cases the level of maternal stress is indeed positively correlated with SRB. In the second article, I exploit quasi-experimental variations in the duration of exposure to a school stipend project to identify the effect of maternal education on child mortality in Bangladesh. Using birth history data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, I find that an additional year of maternal schooling reduces both under-five and infant mortality by about 20%. I also document a number of mechanisms, including greater wealth and literacy, positive assortative mating, lower fertility, delayed marriage and childbearing, greater health-related knowledge, better health-seeking behaviours, and female empowerment, but not female employment. In the third article, I combine individual-level data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey and province-level data on wartime bombing to assess the long-term impact of the Vietnam War on Vietnamese women's attitudes towards intimate partner violence (IPV). To establish a causal link, I use a province's distance to the arbitrarily drawn border between North Vietnam and South Vietnam as an instrument for bombing intensity in that province. I find that women living in provinces that were heavily bombed during the Vietnam War are more likely to accept IPV, reflecting the normalisation of and desensitisation to violence in the private sphere among those who were exposed to conflict violence