The Demand for Season of Birth

Abstract

We study the determinants of season of birth for married women aged 20-45 in the US, using birth certi cate and Census data. We also elicit the willingness to pay for season of birth through discrete choice experiments implemented on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We document that the probability of a spring rst birth is signi cantly related to mother's age, education, race, ethnicity, smoking status during pregnancy, receiving WIC food bene ts during pregnancy, pre-pregnancy obesity and the mother working in \education, training, and library" occupations, whereas among unmarried women without a father acknowledged on their child's birth certi cate, all our ndings are muted. A summer rst birth does not depend on socioeconomic characteristics, although it is the most common birth season in the US. Among married women aged 20-45, we estimate the average marginal willingness to pay (WTP) for a spring birth to be 877 USD. This implies a willingness to trade-o 560 grams of birth weight to achieve a spring birth. Finally, we estimate that an increase of 1,000 USD in the predicted marginal WTP for a spring birth is associated with a 15 pp increase in the probability of obtaining an actual spring birth.