Parents preferring sons tend to go on to have more children un- til one or more boys are born, and to concentrate investment in boys for a given sibsize. Therefore, having a brother may affect child outcomes in two ways: indirectly, by decreasing sibsize, and directly, where sibsize remains...

In a pro-male biased society, brothers may reduce the parental investment received by female siblings, if parents face time or financial constraints. But brothers may also cause positive externalities. Using more than 12,000 firstborn twins from a highly sex-imbalanced economy, Taiwan, we test...

Son-preferring parents tend to continue to have babies until a son's birth. After deciding the set of children, the parents with resource constraints may divert family sources from daughters to a son. Thus, the presence of a son, relative to a daughter, have 2 distinct effects on his sister's...

Parents preferring sons tend to go on to have more children until one or more boys are born, and to concentrate investment in boys for a given sibsize. Therefore, having a brother may affect child outcomes in two ways: indirectly, by decreasing sibsize, and directly, where sibsize remains...

Recent studies based on US data have provided evidence to suggest that the 'quarter of birth' (QOB) may be endogenous and that the use of QOB as an instrumental variable will consequently produce inconsistent estimates (see Buckles and Hungerman, 2013). Such potential endogeneity is addressed in...

Estimates of willingness to pay (WTP) for health, environmental, and other goods obtained using contingent valuation (CV) have been criticized as inadequately sensitive to the scope or magnitude of the good. We investigate the sensitivity of WTP to variation in the magnitude of reductions in...

This study finds that the introduction of sex-selective abortion in Taiwan due to the legalization of abortion when prenatal sex-detection technology was already available increased the fraction of males born at higher parities and changed the composition of mothers choosing to give birth....