AUTHOR=Wang Yonglong , Gozgor Giray , Lau Chi Keung Marco TITLE=Effects of pandemics uncertainty on fertility JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health VOLUME=10 YEAR=2022 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.854771 DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2022.854771 ISSN=2296-2565 ABSTRACT=

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected various dimensions of the economies and societies. At this juncture, this paper examines the effects of pandemics-related uncertainty on fertility in the panel dataset of 126 countries from 1996 to 2019. For this purpose, the World Pandemics Uncertainty Indices are used to measure the pandemics-related uncertainty. The novel empirical evidence is that pandemics-related uncertainty decreases fertility rates. These results are robust to estimate different models and include various controls. We also try to explain why the rise in uncertainty during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the fertility decline.