Rural electrification and fertility decline in Iran

Abstract

A growing body of evidence finds that rural electrification reduces fertility, typically by expanding women’s opportunities outside the home and raising the opportunity cost of childbearing. We examine electrification in post-revolutionary rural Iran, where electricity expanded rapidly but female labor force participation remained low. Using a large panel of villages observed in the 1986, 1996, and 2006 censuses, we show that while Ordinary Least Squares estimates align with the broader literature in suggesting a negative association between electrification and fertility, instrumental variable estimates exploiting elevation-based variation reveal the opposite: villages with longer exposure to electricity experienced higher fertility. This positive effect is strongest in provinces with lower female labor force participation, indicating that the substitution channel emphasized in prior research was weak in the Iranian context. These findings highlight the importance of context in shaping demographic responses to infrastructure and suggest that electrification’s effects on fertility are not universally negative.