as well as from Madagascar (Dessy et al., 2020). Our findings support previous literature on children as ‘normal goods’ that increase as a result of greater wealth (Lindo, 2010; Amialchuk, 2013; Black et al., 2013; Lovenheim and Mumford, 2013)—but only partially, since we find that though fertility responses are higher among poorer households, these responses are concentrated in poorer households _in which women do not have a son_ , and we find no fertility response when husbands’ earnings increase (i.e., when we examine impacts on male intervention beneficiaries). Thus, we contribute to this literature by highlighting a key dimension that makes children a normal good: old age security.

In terms of methodology, our paper contributes to the growing but limited body of studies conducting secondary analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with the objective of drawing more generalizable conclusions. This literature includes pooling RCT databases from different countries to estimate the average impact of microcredit programs using Bayesian hierarchical models (Meager, 2019) and estimating the heterogeneous impacts of a similar program across contexts (Vivalt, 2015). Our study adopts a different approach by testing the impact of two interventions on a single outcome across multiple settings, strengthening the external validity of our results. Importantly, the experiments from which we draw our findings were not initially designed to generate or capture impacts on fertility. This approach to secondary analysis might be a first step towards further research exploiting the growing number of high-quality, RCT-generated panel datasets that are increasingly available to explore new research questions.

From a policy perspective, our findings suggest that strengthening women’s property rights is a promising avenue for reducing fertility in Sub-Saharan Africa. Interventions that secure household-level property rights without ensuring gender equality run the risk of inadvertently increasing fertility. Making sure that laws designed to advance gender equality in property ownership and inheritance are both on the books and put into practice, and increasing provisioning for widows and the elderly (e.g., through basic income guarantees and pensions) may reduce women’s reliance on their sons and could also contribute towards reducing fertility in the region. Note that our results do not speak to the fertility impacts of strengthening the economic prospects of adolescent girls (prior to marriage) on their future fertility. Our study and findings instead focus on the relationship between income and fertility for adult women, who are already married and already working.

Our paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 presents our conceptual framework and reviews current customary and legal arrangements related to inheritance and old-age security in Sub-Saharan Africa and provides a summary of the current state of the theoretical and empirical literature on the determinants of fertility. Section 3 provides details on the datasets used and our empirical strategy. Section 4 presents our main results, while Section 5 investigates mechanisms. Section 6 discusses and concludes.

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