Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly | NBER
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Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly
Caitlin K. Myers
& Ezekiel Hooper
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Working Paper 35310
DOI 10.3386/w35310
Issue Date June 2026
The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
Acknowledgements and Disclosures
This research project began when Ezekiel Hooper was an undergraduate at Middlebury College; he currently is employed by Accenture. We thank Daniel Dench and Phillip Levine for helpful comments. Claude Code (Anthropic) was used to assist with coding; the authors reviewed and are responsible for all code, analysis, and results. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Caitlin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper, "Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly," NBER Working Paper 35310 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35310.
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