Do siblings take your food away? Using China's one-child policy to test for child quantity-quality trade-offs

Abstract

We test for the existence of a trade-off between child quantity and child quality in Chinese families. We use changes over time and space in the local stringency of the one-child policy as a source of exogenous variation in family size. Investment in child quality is measured by intake of three nutrients, using seven waves of data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey. For all three nutrients a quantity-quality trade-off is apparent, which persists for fats if child-specific effects are introduced. The trade-off would be less apparent if exogenous sources of variation in family size were ignored.