Non-Labor Income and the Age of Marriage: Evidence from China's Heating Policy

Junhong Chu (), Haoming Liu and Ivan Png
Additional contact information
Junhong Chu: National University of Singapore

No 11754, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We exploit China's heating policy to investigate how non-labor income affects marriage. From the mid-1950s, the policy gave substantial subsidies to urban residents north of the Huai River. Applying geographic regression discontinuity, we find that, with the policy, urban men in the north married 15 months earlier than southerners. The difference is substantial compared with the average age of first marriage of 24.9 years for urban men in the south. The effect is larger for later birth cohorts, which is consistent with the progressive implementation of the policy. The effect is smaller among women, consistent with women having less power in the household than men. There is no effect among rural people, who did not benefit from the heating policy.

Keywords: non-labor income; regression discontinuity; age at marriage; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 54 pages
Date: 2018-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-sea and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Demography, 2018, 55, 2345–2370

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp11754.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Nonlabor Income and Age at Marriage: Evidence From China’s Heating Policy (2018)
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:iza:izadps:dp11754

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().