【主题】Intrahousehold Resource Allocation, Son Preference, and Fertility Restrictions: A Tale of Birth Order

【报告人】张抒梦（香港中文大学经济系博士）

【时间】2022年12月13日 周二下午 14:30-16:00

【地点】腾讯会议，会议ID：378 706 303，密码：619 145

【语言】英文

【摘要】Birth order is crucial for child development, yet the evidence of the heterogeneous effects of birth order by gender preferences and fertility control policies is limited. This paper aims to study how birth order effects on child health interact with gender preferences and fertility control policies. Using China Family Panel Studies (2010–2018), I begin by documenting a negative birth order effect on health outcomes in rural China. To reveal the mechanism of such birth order effect, I develop a family decision model that incorporates parents’ fertility and investment decisions. The model can not only help understand birth order effects in a general framework in which parents have no gender preferences, but also explain why birth order effects arise in the presence of son preference, sex selection technology, and fertility control policies. Consistent with the model predictions, I find that: 1) the negative birth order effect is lower (in magnitude) in high-income families than in low-income families, which suggests that the early stage of skill formation plays a more important role in human capital than the late stage; 2) in regions with stricter enforcement of the one-child policy, richer families are less likely to have multiple children, and birth order effects in stricter regions are stronger compared to families in less strict regions; 3) in regions with higher son preferences, richer families are more likely to have multiple children, and birth order effects in high-son-preference regions are less prominent compared with those in lower-son-preference regions.

【报告人简介】香港中文大学经济系2017级博士生，研究领域为劳动经济学