Old age, risk, security and children: an empirical evidence from rural India.

Abstract

An investment model of the demand for children is developed to demonstrate that old-age security provided by children is an important consideration in the fertility decisions of parents. "The paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the importance of children as a source of old age support and risk mitigating mechanism. The investment approach for the demand for children is presented in Section III. Section IV...explores the implications in the context of a recent household survey conducted in rural India. Finally, the findings are summarised in Section V."