The more you watch Brazilian telenovelas, the fewer children you have.
This according to an amazing working paper (pdf), brought to my attention by my favorite blog, Salon's How the World Works.
The gist of it is that Brazilian soap operas, over a period of forty years, have consistently starred female characters with one or fewer children—far fewer than the Brazilian norm (see table below, taken from the paper).
Here's where it gets interesting. The researchers—Eliana La Ferrara, Alberto Chong, and Suzanne Duryea—then look at the relationship between novella-watching and child-bearing. Since Brazil in this period was wiring the hinterlands, they can map a difference between regions which received a TV signal and those which didn't.
In regions with the signal, the more someone watches those glamorous, single-child soaps, the fewer children she will have. They also can trace a huge incidence in children being named after the stars of the soaps.
No great surprise there: In the US, Aiden (Sex and the City character) has become the 27th most popular boy's name.
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