Son preference: the case of Hong Kong
Date
2020
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Hong Kong is highly developed yet heavily influenced by traditional social norms, such as the preference for sons over daughters. This paper studies son preference in Hong Kong by exploring the effect of child gender on parents’ fertility and sex selection decisions in the 1991 to 2016 Hong Kong population census/by census. In a society heavily influenced by son preference, both fertility and child gender might be correlated with unobservable family characteristics. To overcome the potential bias from omitted variables, I follow Dahl and Moretti (2008) to explore the randomness of the gender of the first child. Thus, this paper focuses on the effect of firstborn girls versus firstborn boys on fertility and sex selection. ☐ I find that son preference is persistently strong in Hong Kong. Firstborn girls increased fertility as well as the probability of boys in the future. Compared with firstborn boys, firstborn girls caused mothers to have on average 6.74% more children in the 1991 to 2016 censuses, and the magnitude of the effect decreased with time. Concurrent with the diminishing effect of firstborn girls on fertility, son-biased sex selection might became more extensive. In the most recent data from the 2016 census, parents without sons were 20% more likely to have sons at the third parity than parents who already had at least one son. The results suggest that son preference is persistently strong in Hong Kong, and parents might be increasingly likely to substitute the son-biased stopping rule with sex selection to have sons such that they could reach the desired number of sons within the small family.
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Keywords
Hong Kong, Daughters, One child policy, Fertility