Gender, Marriage, and Household Behavior: Evidence from China
Paper Session
Saturday, Jan. 8, 2022 12:15 PM - 2:15 PM (EST)
- Chair: Tony (Tao) Fang, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Does Friends’ Gender Matter for Students’ Academic Achievements?
Abstract
This paper investigates the effects of friends' gender on academic achievement in the context of China. We employ an instrumental variable approach to address the endogeneity of gender composition of adolescents' friendship group. We rely on the variations of school-level average numbers of opposite gender and same gender friends, share of opposite gender schoolmates and parents' strictness with friends making to obtain exogenous variation in the numbers of same gender and opposite gender school friends for the respondents. The results indicate that one additional opposite gender friend reduces standardized total score by 7.474 points, which is about one-fifth of its standard deviation. For individual subject, one additional opposite gender friend reduces Chinese, Mathematics and English by 2.375, 3.343 and 1.756 points, which are about 0.173, 0.247 and 0.151 of their standard deviation, respectively. At the same time, an additional same gender friend reduces standardized total score by 1.301 points, which is about one-tenth of its standard deviation. Similarly, one additional same gender friend reduces Chinese and Mathematics by 0.542 and 0.547 points, respectively, which are about one-tenth of their standard deviation as well. The effect on standardized Mathematics score is not significant. We conduct several robustness checks to show that our results are robust against alternative model specification as well as sample construction. In addition, the effects of friends’ gender vary significantly by gender, grade, as well as academic performance. Contrary to the case for girls, boys' academic performance does not appear to be impacted by friends’ gender in general. Furthermore, we explore the possible channels through which the gender of friends affects academic achievement. We find that an increase in the number of opposite gender friends largely reduces the time spent on homework and increases hours spent on extracurricular activities, implying that maintaining friendship is time consuming and crowdsPaying for the Selected Son: Sex Imbalance and Marriage Payments in China
Abstract
This paper shows that the rising surplus of males in China has strengthened distortions in marriage formation by causing an increase in brideprice payments. The identification relies on the comparison between siblings from the same natal family who are born in different birth years and thus exposed to various demographic structures. I find robust evidence that a rise in male-female sex ratios significantly increases the incidence and market value of brideprices, but has no influence on dowries. Dowries are found to carry an intergenerational function for help and care in parents' old age but brideprices are not. Such a positive effect on brideprices is found predominantly in natal families characterized by low education, smaller number of children, and with more daughters than sons. Further investigations suggest that dowry values are positively associated with female welfare. This paper provides the first empirical evidence showing that demographic imbalance causes marriage distortions with a rise in brideprices, and suggests that brideprices and dowries carry different significance in the Chinese society.One-Child Policy, Differential Fertility, and Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality in China
Abstract
Using nationally representative longitudinal household survey data, this study finds that China’s one-child policy (OCP), one of the most extreme forms of birth control in recorded history, has amplified the intergenerational transmission of inequality in the country. Rural/poor Chinese families, whose fertility choices are less constrained by the OCP than those of urban/rich ones, have more children but invest less in their human capital. Since education is a major determinant of earnings, income inequality persists and increases across generations. Our results also show that the OCP accounts for 32.7%–47.3% of the decline in intergenerational income mobility in recent decades.Discussant(s)
Tony (Tao) Fang
,
Memorial University of Newfoundland
He Jiang
,
Virginia Tech
Yuanwei Xu
,
University of Muenster
Yi Fan
,
National University of Singapore
JEL Classifications
- D9 - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics