Causal effects of sex preference on sex-blind and sex-selective child avoidance and substitution across birth years: Evidence from the Japanese year of the fire horse

The Missing Link Between Parents’ Preferences and Daughters’ Survival: The Moderator Effect of Societal Discrimination

“…Although important steps have been taken to better understand the complex relationship between preferences and discrimination against young females (Rohlfs et al, 2010), to our knowledge, no study has yet provided a comprehensive explanation of why, contrary to what was expected, the positive relationship between the number of wanted female children and their survival is not found in every scenario. The reason why previous works provide an unsatisfactory explanation of this phenomenon could rest on the lack of comprehensive theoretical analysis of the particularities of human behavior under circumstances of societal discrimination and poverty (Appadurai, 2004;Ray, 2006).…”

“…On the one hand, parents might bear son preferences and allocate survival resources unequally between sons and daughters (Qian, 2008;Rohlfs et al, 2010;Rosenzweig & Schultz, 1982). On the other hand, discriminatory institutions might limit what parents can do to fight for the survival of their female children (Branisa, Klasen, & Ziegler, 2013;Luke & Munshi, 2007), for example, through the characteristics of the social actors involved in the care of their children, such as physicians who could also bear son preferences (Patel, Badhoniya, Mamtani, & Kulkarni, 2013).…”

“…With regard to measuring the parents' performance on avoiding deprivation, mortality provides a better measure than food intake (Sen, 1984). Using cohort 0-1 as the focus of the analysis (Bhalotra, 2010;Nandi, 2014;Rohlfs et al, 2010;Shepherd, 2008), our dependent variable is defined by the number of daughters that die up to that age. The focus on the mortality of girls avoids over/underestimations due to biological differences in mortality of male and female children (for a deep analysis of the female biological advantage, see Drevenstedt, Crimmins, Vasunilashorn, &Finch, 2008, or Seifarth, McGowan, & Milne, 2012, or due to intentional and unintentional underreporting of female births and deaths (Clark, 2000;Das Gupta, Chung, & Shuzhuo, 2009), while raising the need to control for parents' ability to avoid infant mortality.…”

“…An alarming type of discrimination is intrahousehold discrimination against female children (Lin, Liu, & Qian, 2014;Mangyo, 2008;Oster, 2009a;Qian, 2008;Rohlfs, Reed, & Yamada, 2010;Rosenzweig & Schultz, 1982).…”

Taboos, Agriculture and Poverty

“…2 Only recently have economists started looking at explanations and effects of specific beliefs, superstition and taboos. Fudenberg and Levine (2006) and Be´nabou and Tirole (2007) develop theoretical models to explain the persistence of superstition and taboos while Do and Phung (2006), Rohlfs et al (2010), Wong and Yung (2005), and Lee (2005) look empirically at effects of superstition. In this article, we analyse empirically the relationship between taboos and agriculture and household consumption in Madagascar using a recent comprehensive nationally representative household survey.…”