Child Gender And Parental Investments In India: Are Boys And Girls Treated Differently?

Silvia Barcellos, Leandro Carvalho and Adriana Lleras-Muney

No 17781, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Although previous research has not always found that boys and girls are treated differently in rural India, son-biased stopping rules imply that estimates of the effect of gender on parental investments are likely to be biased because girls systematically end up in larger families. We propose a novel identification strategy for overcoming this bias. We document that boys receive significantly more childcare time than girls. In addition boys are more likely to be breastfed longer, and to be given vaccinations and vitamin supplementation. We then present suggestive evidence that the differential treatment of boys is neither due to their greater needs nor to the effect of anticipated family size.

JEL-codes: I15 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-ltv
Note: CH EH LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published as “Child gender and Parental Investments in India: Are boys and Girls Treated Differently?” forthcoming, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. (joint with Silvia H. Barcellos and Leandro Carvalho)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17781.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Child Gender and Parental Investments in India: Are Boys and Girls Treated Differently? (2014)
Working Paper: Child Gender and Parental Investments in India Are Boys and Girls Treated Differently? (2010)
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:nbr:nberwo:17781

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17781

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().