演講者簡介 : Professor Chang received his Ph.D. in Economics from Michigan State University, USA at 2009. He is currently a Graduate Director & Associate Professor of Finance at China Center for Human Capital and Labor Market Research. His research fields are Health Economics, Labor Economics, Demographic Economics, and Chinese Economy.
演講摘要 : In 2013, more than one third of the countries in the world still criminalize homosexual relations. Among other distinctions, these countries tend to have higher population sex ratios, i.e. number of men per women, than others. On the contrary, countries that used to penalize homosexuality tended to have lower-than-average sex ratios when they repealed anti-homosexuality laws. This paper argues that a high sex ratio could lead to a social environment that is conducive to the retaining of anti-homosexuality laws through two channels. First, heterosexual men generally hold more hostile attitudes toward homosexual people than do heterosexual women. Second, a high sex ratio promotes a masculinity ideology by increasing the competition in the heterosexual relationships market, which in turn suppresses homosexuality. Empirically, regressions using country-level data show that criminalization of homosexuality is positively associated with sex ratio. In particular, such correlation appears to be stronger in democratic countries, where laws are more likely to reflect the majority of citizens’ preferences, than in autocratic states. Moreover, regressions using individual-level data on attitudes toward homosexuality show that even after controlling for individual sex and other characteristics, sex ratio still has a negative effect on individuals’ attitudes toward homosexual people, a finding that supports the second channel.
