https://macropaperwarehouse.com/authors/roberta-ziparo/Roberta ZiparoHugo -- gohugo.ioen-ushttps://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/gendered-spheres-of-learning-and-household-decision-making-over-fertility/https://macropaperwarehouse.com/papers/gendered-spheres-of-learning-and-household-decision-making-over-fertility/<p>This paper investigates whether information asymmetries within households about maternal health risk can explain persistent spousal disagreement over fertility in a high-fertility, high-maternal-mortality setting. The authors develop a theoretical model and conduct a randomized field experiment among approximately 500 couples in peri-urban Lusaka, Zambia, where the lifetime risk of maternal death is 1 in 59 women and the maternal mortality ratio is 398 deaths per 100,000 live births.</p> <p>The central mechanism is a communication barrier that arises from conflicting fertility preferences between spouses. When husbands have higher desired fertility than wives (4.43 vs. 4.19 children on average in the study sample), wives who are better informed about maternal health risk lack the incentive to credibly transmit that information to their husbands. Strategic communication concerns — not a generically lower propensity of men to learn from women — drive this asymmetry. The model predicts a pooling equilibrium in which no informative communication flows from wives to husbands when preference divergence is sufficiently large.</p>