The phenomenon of son preference in the People's Republic of China and throughout much of Asia has been well documented. However, changing economic conditions, such as increases in educational attainment and employment opportunities for women and the rise in the prevalence of one-child families,...

Labor market liberalization, such as state-owned enterprises reform that allows firms to fire redundant workers, has unclear effects on labor market conditions and skill acquisition empirically. This paper studies the effects of labor market liberalization on education-specific labor market...

Government policies may alter cultural practices that persist in part due to economic incentives. In this paper, I develop a conceptual framework that shows how compulsory schooling affects parental incentives and exacerbates pre-existing son-preferences in China. I make six testable predictions...

I first document that the introduction of the One Child Policy dramatically increased sex selection in certain regions, and that the Chinese government responded to this by allowing parents who had a daughter as their first child to try for a second child. Next, I show that the increase in...

This paper explores how the relative circumstances of men and women following marital dissolution affect sex-selection behavior within marriages. China's 2001 divorce reform liberalized divorce in favor of women and secured women's property rights after separation. We use this improvement in...

We use several datasets to study whether son preference prevails in the human capital investment among Chinese rural-urban migrant households. We find that son preference exists among the rural migrants' households and that it caused lower probabilities relative to that of their boy counterparts...

The investments parents make in their children can be gender specific. I study the impact of family planning policies on gender-specific outcomes. Empirically, this paper uses China’s Family Planning Policy (FPP), enacted in 1971, to understand how a reduction in the number of children in a...

Increased education affects market and non-market outcomes. This paper investigates the causal impact of the extension of compulsory education from 6 to 9 years on females' education, marriage, and fertility outcomes in Thailand. Using data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) and a...

Increased education affects market and non-market outcomes. This paper investigates the causal impact of the extension of compulsory education from 6 to 9 years on females' education, marriage, and fertility outcomes in Thailand. Using data from the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) and a...