2026 General Seminar - Moshe Hazan (Monash)

Title: She Who Pays the Piper Calls the Number: Reparations and Gender Differences in Fertility Choice 

by Moshe Hazan & Shay Tsur 

Abstract:  We study how shifting intra-household control over resources affects fertility, exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in Israel where some Holocaust survivors began receiving substantial and unexpected reparations in 1957 and others decades later. Using a triple-difference design with heterogeneity by age, we compare fertility outcomes by timing of reparations, gender of the recipient, and age. Households where only the young female partner received reparations early had 0.25–0.4 fewer children than comparable households where only the male was treated. An event study shows that this effect is driven entirely by post-1957 fertility, suggesting a causal link to increased female resource control.