Arbeitspapier
The Fertility-Sex Ratio Trade-off: Unintended Consequences of Financial Incentives
Lower fertility can translate into a more male-biased sex ratio if son preference is persistent and technology for sex-selection is easily accessible. This paper investigates whether financial incentives can overcome this trade-off in the context of an Indian scheme, Devirupak, that seeks to decrease both fertility and the sex ratio at birth. First, I construct a model where the effects of incentives are determined by the strength of son preference, the cost of children, and the cost of sex-selection, relative to the size of incentives. Second, I create a woman-year panel dataset from retrospective birth histories and use variation in the composition of pre-existing children as well as the state and the year of program implementation to estimate its causal effect. Devirupak successfully lowers the number of children by 1 percent, but mainly through a 2 percent decrease in the number of daughters. Faced with a choice between a son and only daughters, couples choose a son despite lower monetary benefits, and thus the sex ratio at birth unintentionally increases. A subsidy worth 10 months of average household consumption expenditure is insufficient to induce parents to give up sons entirely. Instead, Devirupak increases the proportion of one-boy couples by 5 percent. The proportion of one-girl couples increases only among the lowest socioeconomic status groups.
- Sprache
-
Englisch
- Erschienen in
-
Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 8044
- Klassifikation
-
Wirtschaft
Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
Health and Economic Development
- Thema
-
sex ratio
fertility
India
Haryana
financial incentives
- Ereignis
-
Geistige Schöpfung
- (wer)
-
Anukriti, S
- Ereignis
-
Veröffentlichung
- (wer)
-
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
- (wo)
-
Bonn
- (wann)
-
2014
- Handle
- Letzte Aktualisierung
-
10.03.2025, 11:45 MEZ
Datenpartner
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Objekttyp
- Arbeitspapier
Beteiligte
- Anukriti, S
- Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Entstanden
- 2014
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