The Missing Link Between Parents’ Preferences and Daughters’ Survival: The Moderator Effect of Societal Discrimination

Rebeca Echávarri and Javier Husillos

World Development, 2016, vol. 78, issue C, 372-385

Abstract: The premature mortality of female children is an alarming demographic outcome in many countries of the world. The most popular explanation for this phenomenon is the prevalence of son preference. However, empirical findings indicate that the assumption of a positive relationship between wanted daughters and female children’s survival is not found in every scenario, and it does not have a clear explanation in the literature. To fill this gap, we present a simple model that provides insights into how the positive marginal effect of wanted daughters on their survival might decrease with higher societal discrimination against young females. The model draws on the emerging literature that examines the erosion of cognitive and noncognitive skills that results from poverty and discrimination. Our theoretical findings are tested for the case of India, using the third round of the National Family Health Survey, with Zero-Inflated Poisson models. Our estimates provide support for the interaction of parents’ preferences and societal discrimination against female children. In particular, we show that the statistical significance of the marginal effect of wanted daughters on their survival disappears in contexts of high societal discrimination against female children. Our study contributes to the literature by questioning the commonly held assumption of additive separability between the effect of family and societal characteristics. One central implication is that the alleviation of poverty alone might fail to automatically reduce sex-based discriminatory practices, and that multidimensional interventions are required that target the individual and society.

Keywords: psychology of discrimination; children survival; gender; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X15002594
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:78:y:2016:i:c:p:372-385

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.10.037

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().