# **4 The Data**

The data used in this paper come from surveys conducted in Albania in four different moments in time: the 2002 Living Standard Measurement Survey (LSMS), the 2005 Living Standard Measurement Survey (LSMS), the 2008-09 Demographic Health Survey (DHS) and the 2012 Living Standard Measurement Survey (LSMS). The LSMS surveys were undertaken by the Albanian National Institute of Statistics (INSTAT) with the technical assistance of the World Bank. The 2008-09 DHS was conducted by the INSTAT but also by the Institute of Public Health (IPH). These surveys correspond to different wave rounds, but it is important to note that they do not form a panel database. They are nationally representative surveys for the whole country, as well as at regional and at the urban/rural level. Each survey contains a wide range of information on individuals’ demographic and socioeconomic characteristics (i.e. fertility, health, employment, migration and education among many others). In each one of these databases, the country is stratified into four regions (strata), Tirana, Coastal, Central and Mountain. All the surveyed individuals belong to the 36 districts in the country, with all regions nearly equally represented.

These surveys interviewed both women and men with respect to their fertility decisions, thereby permitting the unique opportunity to incorporate information in my study regarding the fertility history of each household. In other words, each one of these surveys contains detailed information which helps identify children by birth of order and match them with their biological mother and father. For instance, in the 2008-09 DHS survey, all the children ever born are already matched to each one of their corresponding mother and father, which makes the DHS a perfect database for studying the fertility history of the parents. In contrast, in the LSMS surveys, the fertility history information is not as clearly identified as in the DHS, which means that the children are not already linked to their corresponding parents. However, the advantage of the LSMS surveys is that they provide a direct mother and father identifier code, which is used to link the children to their corresponding parents. In addition, the Albanian LSMSs databases are a special case in terms of fertility compared to other LSMS surveys because they contain very detailed information on the family structure of each one of the households, including information about the children no longer living in the household, which makes possible the construction of the entire fertility history of each parent in the databases.<sup>9</sup> Following similar studies in the literature, I limit the analysis to mothers aged between 20 and 49 years old with at least two children whose oldest child was at most 18 years old at the time of the surveys. Firstly, women who are younger than 20 years old are excluded from the analysis because none of them have two children. Since the instrumental variable used in this study is

> 9The 2002 LSMS contains a specific module on fertility, where it is possible to identify the maternity history of every woman in the database. This type of module is not included in the 2005 and 2012 LSMS surveys, but for these cases the Migration module and Sons and Daughters Living Away module are used to construct the fertility history.

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