Working Paper
Fertility Policy Relaxation and Intra-Household Bargaining: Evidence from China’s One-Child Policy Generation
Abstract: What shapes the bargaining positions of the husband and wife within a family? This paper explores the effect of changes in fertility restriction policies on the intra-household bargaining of adults born under such a policy using the Chinese context. Starting from the mid-1980s, China carried out a partial relaxation to their compulsory One-Child Policy, allowing rural households to have two children if their first child happened to be female. Utilising the novel identification of cross-province differences in the timing of relaxation adoption, I found that the relaxation improved women’s intra-household bargaining position. This is evidenced by an increase in leisure and a smaller burden of both housework and labour among rural-born women and a lower marriage rate among rural-born men. Further evidence shows that the relaxation impacted marriage market conditions via a divergence of perceived gender norms across men and women, but did not actually worsen the male-biased sex ratio distortion in China.
Work in Progress
Disentangling Kinship: Inheritance and coresidence norms in Timor-Leste
Abstract: As an important aspect of culture, kinship traditions have a strong implication on intra-household interactions as they influence with whom and how people are interacting on an everyday basis. In this paper, I seek to differentiate between the impacts of the two important aspects of kinship norms – who do people inherit from, and whose family people live with after marriage. This is made possible by utilizing the unique characteristics of Timor-Leste, where in some communities people live with the wife’s family after marriage (practicing matrilocality), but do not inherit from maternal relatives (not practicing matriliny). Looking into an extensive set of outcomes, I find that matrilocality makes the entire family more involved in childcare, while matriliny is associated with women substituting time spent inside the household with time spent outside the household. I further show that such effects are not driven by the geographical determinants of kinship norms.