Lianyungang, a booming port city, has China's most extreme gender ratio for children under four: 163 boys for every 100 girls. These numbers don't seem terribly grim, but in ten years, the skewed sex ratio will pose a colossal challenge. By the time those children reach adulthood, their...

Acknowledgments -- Matters of vital importance : demography and the mid-twentieth-century population imaginary -- Rereading Malthus : population and masculine modernity -- Narratives of exclusion, mechanisms of inclusion : demographic boundary work -- Remaking Malthusian couplings for the...

In this paper, we show that the one-child policy has played a significant role in the decline of China's fertility. The one-child policy had reduced China's fertility rate by an additional 11.5%, based on a year-on-year comparison with the case if China had not implemented the policy. The...

This paper estimates the effect of having children on labor force participation of mothers in urban Iranian areas. I exploit sex composition of children as an exogenous source of variation in family size to account for endogeneity of fertility. Using information from the Iranian Household Income...

The introduction of prenatal sex-detection technologies in India has led to a phenomenal increase in abortion of female fetuses. We investigate their impact on son-biased fertility stopping behavior, parental investments in girls relative to boys, and the relative chances of girls surviving...

How does a shock to sex ratios affect marriage markets and fertility? I use the drastic change in sex ratios caused by World War II to identify the effects of unbalanced sex ratios on Russian women. Using unique data from the Soviet archives, the results indicate that male scarcity led to lower...