The Effects of Sibling Sex Composition on Child Mortality and Education
2010/11/02
研討會日期 : 2010-11-02
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Stacey Chen
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Stacey H. Chen got her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Rochester in 2002. She is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Department of Economics at Royal Holloway University of London. Her research field is in labor economics, development economics and applied econometrics. She is applying for the position of the Institute of Economics, AS right now.
演講摘要 : n a pro-male society, brothers may reduce parents' investment in daughters, given resource constraints. But brothers also may create positive externalities. We test whether girls have higher juvenile mortality or less opportunity to attend college if they have a brother rather than a sister. We address problems of endogenous child gender -- prevalent in societies with strong demand for boys --by exploiting the fact that twin sex is random, given the sex of the other twin, if technologies for prenatal sex testing are unavailable. Using national birth registry data from a highly sex-imbalanced economy, Taiwan, we first document an exceedingly strong pro-male bias in fertility-stopping rules. Perhaps surprisingly, we find no detrimental effect of having a twin brother (relative to a twin sister) on twin girls' or boys' juvenile mortality, and no effect on twin boys' admission rate to college. However, the effect on twin girls' college admission rates is ambiguous.
