PEER EFFECTS AND FERTILITY PREFERENCES IN CHINA: EVIDENCE FROM THE CHINA LABOR-FORCE DYNAMICS SURVEY

Peng Nie, Lu Wang and Alfonso Sousa-Poza
Additional contact information
Peng Nie: School of Economics and Finance, Xi’an Jiaotong University, 710061 Xi’an, P. R. China†Institute for Health Care & Public Management, University of Hohenheim, 70599 Stuttgart, Germany‡IZA, Bonn, Germany§Health Econometrics and Data Group, University of York, UK
Lu Wang: School of Economics and Finance, Xi’an Jiaotong University, 710061 Xi’an, P. R. China
Alfonso Sousa-Poza: School of Economics and Finance, Xi’an Jiaotong University, 710061 Xi’an, P. R. China†Institute for Health Care & Public Management, University of Hohenheim, 70599 Stuttgart, Germany‡IZA, Bonn, Germany

The Singapore Economic Review (SER), 2025, vol. 70, issue 03, 695-723

Abstract: Despite empirical evidence that individuals form their fertility preferences by observing social norms and interactions in their environments, the exact impact of these peer effects remains unclear. We thus use data from the 2014 and 2016 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey to investigate the association between community-level peer effects and fertility preferences among Chinese women aged 18–49. Whereas our baseline results indicate that 11.96% of these women would prefer 1 or no children, 74.1% would like 2 children and 13.93% would prefer 3 or more children. A one unit increase in community-level peer fertility reduces the preference of wanting only one child by 14.3%, whereas it increases the probability of preferring three children by 9.3% and four or more children by 4.8%. Hence, overall, we find a relatively strong peer effect on individual fertility preferences in communities characterized by generally low fertility rates, which provide support for the role of social norms in the fertility choices of reproductive-aged Chinese women.

Keywords: Peer effects; fertility; fertility preferences; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 D71 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217590821500120
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:wsi:serxxx:v:70:y:2025:i:03:n:s0217590821500120

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S0217590821500120

Access Statistics for this article

The Singapore Economic Review (SER) is currently edited by Euston Quah

More articles in The Singapore Economic Review (SER) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().