Time: May 12 (Fri.), 13:30 – 15:00(Beijing Time)

Title: Family Size and Child Migration: Do Daughters Face Greater Trade-Offs than Sons?

Venue: Zhonghui Building 106

About the speaker:

Sharon Xuejing Zuo, Assistant professor at the School of Economics. Dr. Zuo is specialized in labor economics, experimental economics and the Chinese economy and has special interests in gender inequality. Dr. Zuo has published research papers in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2019),The Review of Economics and Statistics (2021), and Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (2023). Dr. Zuo is the PI of the NSFC (youth) (2021-2023). Dr. Zuo also serves as an Associate Editor for the journal of China Economic Review.

Abstract:

The reallocation of labor force from low-productivity rural areas to high-productivity urban areas is an important contributor to economic growth. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about children who migrate with parents and about how family size may affect child migration. Using a nationwide dataset on rural-to-urban migrants in China, this study documents that three-quarters of families with children aged below 12 have at least one migrant child, and that around 70 percent of sons and daughters migrate with their parents. Exploiting exogenous variation in twinning as an instrument for family size, we also find that a one unit increase in sibship size decreases the probability that a daughter migrates by 10.9 percentage points but has negligible effects on the probability that a son migrates. The negative family size effects for daughters are stronger when children are of primary school age and when parents have access to pensions. The results are indicative of the presence of sibship trade-offs for daughters in a novel aspect of parental investments: child migration. Such trade-offs are consistent with strong son preference and the belief that daughters are of limited economic value to parents.