Baby Bonus, Fertility, and Missing Women

This paper presents novel causal evidence on the effects of pro-natalist financial incentives on babies. I exploit rich spatial and temporal variation in cash transfers provided to families with newborn babies and the universe of birth, death, and migrant registry records in South Korea. I find that the total fertility rate in 2015 would have been 3% lower without the cash transfers. The selection of working mothers into childbearing decreased gestational age, leading to an overall reduction in birth weight, but no change in early-life mortality. The cash transfers had an unintended consequence of correcting the unnaturally male-skewed sex ratio