to be causal. First, in the absence of the implementation of the land reform, our estimate of the policy impact 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 observe in the data. 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 is no contamination of the non-reform districts by the reform districts, e.g., there should be no change, due to influences from the reform districts, in aggregate fertility behavior at the district level of the districts that were unexposed to the reform. 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 because of influences from the exposed districts. As a robustness check, we compare non-reform districts sharing a border with a reform district to non-reform districts not sharing a border with a reform district in a placebo differences-in-differences specification. Third, policy endogeneity may affect the adequacy of non-reform districts as a within-region control group, i.e., the selection of districts into the reform due to 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 which are correlated with the implementation of the reform and fertility rates. As a robustness check, we use the selection-on-observables approach (Altonji et al., 2005; Bellows and Miguel, 2008; Nunn, 2011) to assess whether the potential bias from time varying unobservables drives the selection of districts into the reform.

Our findings point towards a substantial effect of the land reform on fertility outcomes. For the full sample, we estimate a 0.99 reduction in the total fertility rate, i.e., a reduction of lifetime fertility by one child per woman. This result is clearly driven by the rural rather than the urban sample. For the rural sample, we estimate a 1.2 reduction in the total fertility rate. Looking at age-specific fertility rates, from which the total fertility rate is constructed, we find a clear reduction in fertility for virtually all age groups in the rural sample. The effect is particularly pronounced for women in the most fertile age groups, 25—29 and 30—34. With respect to the mechanism at work, we argue that the arrangement of property rights over land before the reform led to a higher economic gain from children. It derived from children’s contributing to household wealth in an environment of otherwise weakly defined property rights. More specifically, if land is redistributed according to household size, land holdings and thus wealth depend positively on the number of children. Abolishing the positive relationship between land and household size leads to a reduction in fertility. Furthermore, through robustness checks, we conclude that our impact estimates are not downward biased due to spillovers from reform districts into non-reform districts. Furthermore, using a selection-on-observables approach, we find no 3