 Living with the In-laws in China: Which Way is the Spousal Transfer?Wei Yang () and
Michael Veall
Economics Bulletin, 2020, vol. 40, issue 4, 3147-3152 Abstract: Chinese couples sometimes live with the husband's parents (virilocal marriages) or the wife's parents (uxorilocal marriages). Among possible losses and gains, the moving spouse may work for her/his spouse's family and receive food and living space. We argue that the likely predominant direction of the net transfer may be ascertained from the relative perceived “quality†(e.g. youth, education) of the marriage partners. Probit analysis on 2005 Chinese data suggests that living with the in-laws is associated with “moving up†in partner quality. Hence, conditional on partner quality, living with the in-laws as opposed to living separately from parents would likely require an offsetting transfer to the moving spouse. The increasing shortage of women marriage partners (due to son preference and sex-selective abortion) may therefore tend to increase living with the wife's family and reduce living with the husband's family. Policies which normalize these changes in living arrangements might slightly reduce son preference. Keywords: virilocal marriage; uxorilocal marriage; intramarriage transfers; son preference (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ebl:ecbull:eb-19-00592 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Economics Bulletin from AccessEcon |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.