This article uses China's family planning policies to quantify and explain spillovers in fertility decisions. We test whether ethnic minorities decreased their fertility in response to the policies, although only the majority ethnic group, the Han Chinese, were subject to birth quotas. We...

I empirically characterize China's One-Child Policy as an individually tailored, age-specific pricing system allowing women to have more than one child. I exploit within-woman variation to find that a 1% increase in the price of a permit to have a second or third child decreased the number of...

In this paper, we show that fertility shapes the risky investment decisions of the rich and the poor in opposite ways. By exploiting the staggered adoption of two-child policy in place of one-child policy in China, we document that increased fertility encourages richer households to participate...

This study comprehensively examines export tariff liberalization’s influence on women’s marital and fertility decisions in China, using accession to the WTO as a natural experiment. Our identification relies on the shift-share design that combines industry-level variation in export tariff...

China introduced its stringent family planning policies from the early 1970s, known as the “Later, Longer, Fewer" policies, and followed it with the One-Child Policy from 1979. The number of children born to Chinese parents significantly decreased from 5.7 in late 1960s to 2.5 in 1988. In Chen...

Does the number of future anticipated children affect educational investment in parents-to-be? In theory, anticipated children can affect the returns to education, the resources available for family consumption, and the incentives for pre-marital investment. Changes in the eligibility criteria...

We incorporate pollution exposure into Becker's "Quantity-Quality" (Q-Q) model of fertility and quantify how air pollution distorts individuals' fertility behaviors in China. We document a robust pattern in which increased pollution over time negatively affects the fertility of ethnic Han...

This article uses China's family planning policies to quantify and explain spillovers in fertility decisions. We test whether ethnic minorities decreased their fertility in response to the policies, although only the majority ethnic group, the Han Chinese, were subject to birth quotas. We...

We examine whether women exposed to China's one-child policy (OCP) change their fertility decisions when they migrate to a country without fertility restrictions. Using American Community Survey data (2010 2020), we compare the childbearing decisions of Chinese-born women with varying degrees of...

This paper examines the impact of having only one child on parental risk behaviors in societies where children serve as a bedrock for elderly support. Employing regional and temporal variation from the enforcement of the One-Child Policy, our instrumental variable estimates show that the...