The Trade-off between Family Size and Child Health in Rural Bangladesh

摘要

Most of the work testing the quantity-quality model has concentrated on the trade-off between family size and educational attainment. We argue that child health is a plausible measure of child quality that has not been fully explored in the empirical literature. Using data from the Matlab Health and Socioeconomic Survey, we estimate the effect of family size on child mortality and several measures of child health. Our results suggest that even in rural Bangladesh there is little evidence of a trade-off between child quantity and health.