Parents invest differently in sons and daughters. This paper formally re-examines the application of the Trivers Willard hypothesis to humans. Differential fecundity and assortive matching in marriage are necessary for parents to invest differently in the skills of their sons and daughters....

Women are fecund for a shorter period of their lives than men. In monogamous societies with divorce and remarriage, fecund women are relatively scarce. This paper studies how parents, who maximize discounted dynastic consumption, invest in the survival of their sons and daughters. The theory...