Title: Gender Differences in Parental Investments and Intergenerational Transfers in China

Speaker: Professor Xiaoyan Lei, Peking University

Time: October 11th, 2016 10:30–12:00 

Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building (College of Economics, JNU)

Abstract:

Using the Chinese Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), we examine parental investment in their children and later repayment from children to their parents. We find strong evidence of son preference in rural areas of China in terms of investments in education, but substantially less favoritism in urban areas where market opportunities for women are likely to be greater. Similarly, the preference for investment in sons is far larger among older cohorts than younger. In fact, for recent urban cohorts of children, the pattern of greater educational investments for boys than girls actually reverses itself and follows the pattern of many developed countries with girls attending college at greater rates than boys. We also find evidence that while sons do“repay” their parents to some extent with transfers in later life. While we observe only a portion of the life course, this repayment appears to be small in relation to the amount initially received. Furthermore, in urban areas, net transfers to children do not differ significantly by the child’s gender, but son in rural areas continue to receive more than daughters even when factoring in the “upstream” transfers. These results suggest strongly that the economic growth, most prominent in urban regions, may be beginning to chip away at the long-held preference towards sons, or at least may be leading to smaller overt differences in treatment of sons and daughters.