This paper presents evidence that increased earnings opportunities for girls can lower household preference for sons, as measured by the household's average reported ideal number of sons relative to ideal number of children. Using the 1995-96 Nepal Living Standards Survey, I find that reported...

Non-unitary household models suggest that enhancing women's bargaining power can influence child health, a crucial determinant of human capital and economic standing throughout adulthood. We examine the effects of a policy shift, the Hindu Succession Act Amendment (HSAA), which granted...

Since the early 1990s, several states in India have introduced financial incentive programs to discourage son preference among parents and to encourage investments in daughters' education and health. This study evaluates one such program in the state of Haryana, Apni Beti Apna Dhan (Our...

This paper addresses two main questions: what is the relationship between fertility and sex selection and how does birth spacing interact with the use of sex-selective abortions? I introduce a statistical method that incorporates how sex-selective abortions affect both the likelihood of a son...

Over the past four decades, the Hindu women in India most likely to use sex-selective abortions—well-educated women with no sons—had the most substantial lengthening of birth intervals and the most biased sex ratios. As a result, we now see cases that reverse the traditional spacing pattern,...

Mental health is clearly an integral part of health. There is no health without mental health. It is the foundation of well-being and effective functioning for an individual and for a community. Mental health and mental illnesses are determined by the interaction of multiple social,...

In many Asian countries the ratio of male to female population is higher than in the West -- as high as 1.07 in China and India, and even higher in Pakistan. A number of authors (most notably Sen, 1992) have suggested that this imbalance reflects excess female mortality and, as a result, have...

The paper studies the impact of prenatal sex selection on the well-being of girls by analyzing changes in children’s nutritional status and mortality during the years since the diffusion of prenatal sex determination technologies in India. We use the ratio of male to female births in the year...

This paper examines the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes in India, a setting where discrimination against women and girls is severe. We use survey data on gender attitudes (specifically, views about the appropriate roles and rights of women and girls) collected from adolescents...

Historically, son preference has been widely prevalent in South Asia, manifested in the form of skewed sex ratios, gender differentials in child mortality, and worse educational investments in daughters versus sons. In the present study, we show, using data from a purposefully designed...