Happy Lunar New Year from the USC US-China Institute!
Gender Imbalance and Social Network Pressures in Rural China: Sex Ratio, Localized Network Interactions and Parental Risk-taking
Hosted by Shorenstein APARC, Xi Chen presents his paper on the pressures caused by imbalanced sex ratios and the resulting impact on parents and community.
Xi Chen
Assistant Professor at Department of Health Policy and Management Yale School of Public Health
This paper draws from unique social network data, collected from households' long-term spontaneous gift exchange records (li dan), combined with household panel data from 18 Chinese villages to explore the prevalence of men's localized pressure to get married. The surveyed villages are home to Chinese ethnic minorities, which largely circumvents endogenous fertility decisions on the first-born child due to the implementation of One Child Policy and its associated relaxations afterwards. To identify the effect of pressure to find wives for their sons on parental risky behavior, we focus on comparing families with a first-born boy versus a first-born girl and distinguish the network spillover effect from the direct effect.
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