Hukou or Son? Access to Urban Citizenship and Sex Selection of Migrants in China

Jun Li, Wei Wang and Mengxuan Wu

Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2026, vol. 74, issue 3, 1079 - 1104

Abstract: China’s hukou reform in 2014 provided migrants with the opportunity to obtain urban hukou, but it also prompted them to weigh the trade-off between securing hukou and having a son. Leveraging the data from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey from 2011 to 2017, we find that the 2014 hukou reform in China resulted in an average increase of 8.43% in the probability that a migrant’s second child is male. Moreover, the reform’s effect on sex selection is particularly salient among migrants from provinces with a two-child policy and among those with long-term settlement intentions. These findings highlight the unintended demographic consequences of institutional reforms and underscore the persistent influence of son preference in shaping fertility behavior.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/737867 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/737867 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

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:ucp:ecdecc:doi:10.1086/737867

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Development and Cultural Change from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().