Fertility and the Daughter-to-Son-Ratio During China’s (More-than) One-Child Policy

Abstract

I empirically characterize China’s One-Child Policy as an individually tailored, age-specific pricing system allowing women to have more than one child. I exploit within-woman variation to find that a 1% increase in the price of a permit to have a second or third child decreased the number of daughters per household by 0.19%, but had a negligible effect on the number of sons. Despite this inelastic response, the policy impacted fertility through large permit prices. The total fertility rate and average daughter-to-son ratio were 1.5 and 0.8 in 2000. Without the policy, these values would been have 2.2 and 0.9.