is the next administrative unit above districts). Noting that the first entry point of the reform was the district administration, we only report results with Huber/White standard errors calculated at the district level.

Three assumptions, however, need to be satisfied for the estimate of β3 to be causal. First, in the absence of the implementation of the land reform, this estimate should be statistically indistinguishable from zero, i.e., no other systematic factor should explain the change in fertility patterns between reform and non-reform districts. We attribute the empirical findings to the implementation of the land reform in some areas but not in others, but we also consider alternative explanations arising from public action in Amhara. The only major policy intervention on a scale similar to the 1997 land reform we became aware of is the Revised Family Code. Updating an earlier Family Code, the Revised Family Code became effective in the year 2000 (Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia 2000). It changed laws regarding marriage, divorce, inheritance, paternity, adoption, and child welfare. Aiming at improved access to resources and the removal of restrictions on employment, it may have helped to strengthen women’s bargaining position within the household and thus decrease fertility. It was a nationwide program even if the start of its implementation varied by region. In the Amhara region, its implementation commenced in 2000 (Hallward-Driemeier and Gajigo, 2013). While we were not able to find any data on the implementation process of the Revised Family Code within Amhara, we presume that it is plausibly orthogonal to the distinguished implementation pattern of the 1997 land reform. Given that the division of Amhara into reform and non-reform areas follows a very specific geographic pattern, we consider it rather unlikely that our estimates actually pick-up the effect of any other program, even if it was not uniformly implemented within the region of Amhara.

Second, there should be no spillover effects from reform to non-reform districts, e.g., there should be no change in aggregate fertility behavior at the district level of unexposed districts because of influences from exposed districts. The fact that the reform varies at the district level circumvents unobserved heterogeneity in fertility behavior at the individual level, i.e., contamination is only an issue if households in non-reform districts alter their fertility behavior systematically in the same direction by observing the changes in the reform districts. As a robustness check, we compare non-reform districts sharing a border with a reform district to that of non-reform districts not sharing a border with a reform district in a placebo difference-in-differences specification.

Third, policy endogeneity may affect the adequacy of using the non-reform districts as a within-region control group, i.e., there might exist a selection of districts into the reform along unobservable district characteristics. While we use fixed effects to average out time-constant unobserved heterogeneity and use the available data from the census to control for time varying factors at the district level, there may still be a bias in the estimates due to time varying unobservables at the district level that are correlated with the implementation of the reform and with fertility rates. As a robustness check, we use the selectionon-observables approach to assess whether the potential bias from time varying 12