The Brother's Penalty : Boy Preference and Girls' Health in China

We propose a novel apples-to-apples comparison strategy to identify the effect of boy preference on girls’ physical health from endogenous sibling gender composition. Employing an instrumental variable approach and data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies, we find that the presence of brothers has a significant penalty effect on their sisters’ height. Specifically, a girl is on average 0.14-0.28 standard deviations shorter if she has a brother than otherwise has a sister. We exclude alternative interpretations that this penalty is a birth order disadvantage by showing that boys are not affected by their younger/older brothers. We also find that the effect of having a brother is more significant in families with below-median income, indicating that most likely parents discriminate against girls against boys when facing limited resources. The results are robust to using different growth charts and excluding gender-neutral ethnic minorities. Our results suggest girls would be taller on average in the absence of boy preference, although direct mechanisms have not been found