Speaker：Minhee Chae
Topic：Fertility and the Gender gap in cognitive skills
This paper examines the relationship between fertility and the gender gap in cognitive skills in a society where son preference is prevalent. Drawing on Becker’s Quantity-Quality trade-off model, we empirically test if the trade-off between quantity and quality of children is larger for daughters than that for sons. To consider the endogenous nature of the demand for children, we exploit an exogenous variation in fertility due to China’s family planning policy. We utilise the policy intensity information collected from hundreds of county gazetteers as an instrument for family size. The main results suggest that an additional sibling widens the gender gap in cognitive test scores by 33.2% of a standard deviation in the rural sample and 9.8% in the urban sample. The pattern is more pronounced in regions with a higher proportion of people who prefer a son over a daughter, and among households who face tighter budget constraints. We also provide suggestive evidence that our findings are strongly associated with belief in a son’s role to carry on family lineage in Confucian tradition.
Minhee Chae is an assistant professor at School of Economics, Nankai University. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in economics from the Australian National University. Her research interests include development, inequality and gender.
Time：May 5 Wed 10:00-11:30
Venue：606, School of Economics
