A Hard Pill to Swallow? Subsidized Contraceptives and Women's Intergenerational Mobility in a Difference-in-Differences Framework

Abstract: The theory and methods of intergenerational mobility attempt to explain the transmission of socioeconomic status between family members of different generations. In this thesis, we study the causal effect of access to contraceptives on the intergenerational mobility of women. Our identification strategy makes use of a series of subsidies on oral contraceptives for young women, which were rolled out across Swedish localities between 1989 and 1998. We investigate the impact of these subsidies on the intergenerational elasticity of income (IGE) of Swedish women born between 1967 and 1978. Our results indicate that access to subsidized oral contraceptives did not have a significant impact on the IGE when outcomes are measured in lifetime earnings. We postulate that increasing income inequality partly explains this. Additional analyses, which instead use household disposable income as the outcome variable, suggest that access to the subsidy may have increased income persistence among women whose fathers were in the top quintile of the income distribution. All in all, our study implies that further academic attention must be devoted to understanding complementary patterns in family, fertility, gender and intergenerational economic persistence.