Family Size and Child Migration: Do Daughters Face Greater Trade-Offs than Sons?

Christine Ho (), Yutao Wang () and Sharon Xuejing Zuo ()
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Christine Ho: School of Economics, Singapore Management University
Yutao Wang: School of Economics, Singapore Management University
Sharon Xuejing Zuo: Fudan University

No 1-2024, Economics and Statistics Working Papers from Singapore Management University, School of Economics

Abstract: Daughters may be less likely to migrate with parents because they tend to have more sib-lings in societies with strong son preference. Exploiting exogenous variation in twinning as an instrument, we find that a one unit increase in family size decreases the probability that a daughter migrates by 12.5 percentage points but has negligible effects on sons in China. The negative associations for daughters are stronger when migration restrictions are more stringent. The results are indicative of gendered family size trade-offs in a novel aspect of parental in-vestment and highlight the need to relax migrant children’s education constraints.

Keywords: Child Migration; Family Size Trade-offs; Son Preference; Parental Investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J13 J16 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2024-01-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-mig, nep-sea and nep-ure
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ris:smuesw:2024_001

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