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Missing Women and the Price of Tea in China:
The Effect of Relative Female Income on
Sex Imbalance
(Job Market Paper)
Nancy Qian∗
Department of Economics, MIT
Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 23, 2005
Abstract
Economists have long argued that the severe sex imbalance which exists in many developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions. However, observed association between sex ratios and economic conditions may not reflect their true effect to the extent sex ratios and economic conditions are associated with omitted variables such as sex preferences. This paper uses exogenous increases in sex-specific agricultural income caused by post-Mao reforms in China to estimate the effects of total income, relative female and relative male incomes on sex ratios of surviving children. The results show that increasing income alone has no effect on sex ratios whereas increasing relative female income increases survival rates for girls and increasing relative male income decreases survival rates for girls. Moreover, increasing the mother’s income increases education attainment for all children while increasing the father’s income decreases education attainment for girls and has no effect on boys’ education attainment. (JEL I12, J13, J16, J24, O13, O15)
* I am grateful to my advisors Josh Angrist, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo for their guidance and support; Daron Acemoglu, Ashley Lester, Sendhil Mullainathan, Dwight Perkins, Mark Rosenzweig, Seth Sanders and Ivan Fernandez-Val for their suggestions; the Michigan Data Center, Huang Guofang and Terry Sicular for data assistance; and the participants of the MIT Development Lunch, the Social Science Research Council Conference for Development and Risk Fellowship Recipients, the Harvard East Asian Conference, and the International Conference on Poverty, Inequality, Labour Market and Welfare Reform in China at ANU RSSS RSPAS for useful comments. I would like to acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council Fellowship for Development and Risk, and the MIT George C. Schultz Fund.
All mistakes are my own. Contact nqian@mit.edu.
Missing Women and the Price of Tea in China:
The Effect of Sex-Specific Earnings on Sex Imbalance
Nancy Qian∗
Department of Economics, Brown University
September 12, 2005
Abstract
Economists have long argued that the severe sex imbalance which exists in many developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions. This paper uses plausibly exogenous increases in sex-specific agricultural income caused by post-Mao reforms in China to estimate the effects of total income and sex-specific incomes on sex ratios of surviving children. The results show that increasing income alone has no effect on sex ratios. In contrast, increasing female income while holding male income constant increases survival rates for girls and increasing male income while holding female income constant decreases survival rates for girls. Moreover, increasing the mother’s
income increases educational attainment for all children while increasing the father’s income decreases education attainment for girls and has no effect on boys’ education attainment. (JEL I12,
J13, J16, J24, O13, O15)
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