Son Preference and Early Childhood Investments in China

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Son Preference and Early Childhood Investments in
China
Douglas Almond Columbia University NBER
Hongbin Li Tsinghua University
Lingsheng Meng University of Maryland
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Research Question

• Do parental investment decisions change when they
  are able to know child gender during pregnancy in
  China?
• Recent research finds big long-term effects of
  the early-childhood environment and parental
  investments
• There is son preference in China
• E.G., high sex ratios (excess of male births)
• During 1980s, sex no longer revealed at birth but
  increasingly revealed during pregnancy
• Rapid diffusion of ultrasound (poorly observed in
  data until now)
• Might change prenatal investments reduce
  investments when fetus is a girl?
• Might affect decision to continue pregnancy

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Prior Work (a selective subset)

• Meng (2009)
• Collects and analyzes data on county-by-county
  diffusion of ultrasound machines across China
  during the 1980s
• Finds that the local access to ultrasound is
  strongly predictive of increased sex ratios at
  birth (more males).
• My job market paper!
• Lhila and Simon (2008)
• Considers Asian immigrants to the USA
• Ultrasound use reported on birth certificate data
  (natality data), proxies for knowing sex
• Finds no effect on prenatal health investments in
  US

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Hypothesized effect 1

• Consider Postnatal investments
• Before ultrasound, knew sex prior to making
  postnatal investments (obviously)
• But if there is heterogeneity in son preference
  across families, then increases in the sex ratio
  at birth with ultrasound availability would
  suggest that following ultrasound availability,
  girls are born to parents with a weaker son
  preference (relative to parents of girls prior to
  ultrasound).
• We hypothesize that postnatal investments in
  girls increased following ultrasound
  availability.

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Hypothesized effect 2

• Consider Prenatal investments
• Reduction in prenatal investments in girls
  following ultrasound availability
• Before ultrasound was available, sex was
  presumably unknown until delivery, which would
  tend to equalize prenatal investments in girls
  versus boys.
• Increased preference sorting with ultrasound
  access would tend to increase prenatal
  investments in girls.
• The prediction for prenatal investments in girls
  following ultrasound availability is ambiguous

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Empirical Approach
Girl 1 if child is female
Ultrasound 1 if ultrasound is available in the county when mother is pregnant
µc county fixed effect
?t year fixed effect
µct county-specific linear time trend

Outcomes prenatal investment neonatal mortality (outcome)
postnatal investment vaccination, breastfeeding, who is taking care of the child
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Outcomes of interest

• Neonatal mortality
• Usually caused by congenital anomalies,
  prematurity and complications of delivery
  (Grossmand and Jacobowitz, 1981)
• May capture impacts on child survival through
  prenatal investment on which we do not have data
• Post-neonatal mortality
• Usually caused by post-neonatal infections and
  accidents (Grossmand and Jacobowitz , 1981)
• May partly capture impacts on child survival
  through postnatal investment
• Direct postnatal investment measures

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Data on Diffusion of Ultrasound

• From thousands of volumes of Local Gazetteers of
  China
• Local Gazetteers
• encyclopedia of a particular region
• compiled by local governments
• introduction time of ultrasound machines often
  recorded as achievement in the public health
  sector
• Reports the year of the introduction of
  ultrasound machines for 1,572 counties

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The spread of ultrasound across Chinese counties

• 1985
• 1995

• 1980
• 1990

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Percent of counties with ultrasound devices in
the sample
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Data births

• Chinese Children Survey
• Conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics of
  China in June 1992
• Representative national data 560,000 households
  surveyed
• Pregnancy history records for women
• pregnancy order, date of conception, use of
  prenatal care, gestation
• pregnancy outcome (miscarriage, abortion, birth
  )
• live births gender, DOB
• Infant mortality
• Retrospective reports of parental investments
• breastfeeding, and childhood vaccinations.

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Robustness Sibling comparison

• Include mother FE into the model
• Use the sub-sample of families with 2 or more
  kids and where the births straddle the
  introduction of ultrasound
• Advantage control for unobservable factors that
  are common to siblings
• Caveat straddling may also be endogenous!

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Conclusions

• Postnatal investments do not seem to change as a
  result of preference-sorting induced by the
  availability of ultrasound
• Female neonatal mortality increases following
  ultrasound availability
• Effect concentrated soon after birth
• Suggests that parents withhold investment in
  female fetuses after prenatal sex determination
  became available
• Inframarginal effect on prenatal investments
  outstrips the potential increase in prenatal
  investments from preference sorting