Publication: On the Quantity and Quality of Girls: Fertility, Parental Investments, and Mortality
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2021-04-28
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2021-04-28
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Access to prenatal sex-detection technology in India has led to a phenomenal increase in abortion of girls. We find that it has also narrowed the gender gap in under-5 mortality, consistent with surviving girls being more wanted than aborted girls. For every three aborted girls, one additional girl survived to age five. Mechanisms include moderation of son-biased fertility stopping and narrowing of gender gaps in parental investments. However, surviving girls are more likely to be born in lower status families. Our findings have implications not only for counts of missing girls but also for the later life outcomes of girls.
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Publication On the Quantity and Quality of Girls(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09)The introduction of prenatal sex-detection technologies in India has led to a phenomenal increase in abortion of female fetuses. This paper examines the impacts of this on girl relative to boy mortality rates after birth, using data from 1973-2005. The analysis finds a narrowing of the gender gap in under-5 mortality rates, in line with surviving girls being more wanted. The estimates show that for every three aborted girls, one additional girl survives to age five. Investigation of the mechanisms finds a narrowing of gender gaps in parental investments in children, moderation of son-biased fertility stopping, and shrinking of the gap between actual and desired fertility. Heterogeneity in fertility responses suggests a shift in the distribution of girls toward lower socioeconomic status families. The findings have implications not only for counts of missing girls, but also for the later life outcomes of girls.Publication Why Are Adult Women Missing? Son Preference and Maternal Survival in India(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-03)This paper is the first to show that excess mortality among adult women can be partly explained by strong preference for male children, the same cultural norm widely known to cause excess mortality before birth or at young ages. Using pooled individual-level data for India, the paper compares the age structure and anemia status of women by the sex of their first-born and uncovers several new findings. First, the share of living women with a first-born girl is a decreasing function of the women's age at the time of the survey. Second, while there are no systematic differences at the time of birth, women with a first-born girl are significantly more likely to develop anemia when young (under the age of 30) and these differences disappear for older women. Moreover, among those in the older age group, they appear to be significantly better off in terms of various predetermined characteristics. These findings are consistent with a selection effect in which maternal and adult mortality is higher for women with first-born girls, especially the poor and uneducated with limited access to health care and prenatal sex diagnostic technologies. To ensure the desired sex composition of children, these women resort to a fertility behavior medically known to increase their risk of death. 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This suggests that, with continuing vigorous efforts to reduce son preference, the "missing girls" phenomenon could be addressed in Asia.Publication The Decision to Invest in Child Quality over Quantity : Household Size and Household Investment in Education in Vietnam(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-06)During Vietnam's two decades of rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallen sharply at the same time that its educational attainment has risen rapidly -- macro trends that are consistent with the hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing. This paper investigates whether the micro-level evidence supports the hypothesis that Vietnamese parents are in fact making a tradeoff between quantity and quality of children. The paper presents new measures of household investment in private tutoring, together with traditional measures of household investments in education. It analyzes data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys and instruments for family size using the distance to the nearest family planning center. The estimation results show that families do indeed invest less in the education of school-age children who have larger numbers of siblings. This effect holds for several indicators of educational investment -- including general education expenditure and various measures of private tutoring investment -- and is robust to various definitions of family size and model specifications that control for community characteristics as well as the distance to the city center. 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