Do Population Control Policies Induce More Human Capital Investment? Twins, Birth Weight and China's “One-Child” Policy

Abstract

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Empirically probing the quantity–quality model

“…Schultz (2008) provides a review. 2 Li et al (2008) and Rosenzweig and Zhang (2009) find evidence consistent with the quantity-quality model, whilst Qian (2009) finds a positive effect of an additional child on school enrolment. Other than these studies, work that estimates the effects of family size on children's education generally relates to developed countries by providing evidence on how family size affects girls' education in the rural population of a large Latin American country, where fertility remains high.…”

“…This is evident from two recent papers: Rosenzweig and Zhang (2009) find that differential birth endowments of twins are important for education choices; they also find evidence of economies of scale with respect to gender sameness, and suggest that these could be driving the findings commonly found in the literature. Angrist et al (2010) on the other hand find no evidence invalidating the identifying restrictions in an Israeli context.…”

“…12 Our 11 Though the importance of birth order for education choices has been highlighted in the literature (Black et al 2010(Black et al , 2011Rosenzweig and Zhang 2009), as we will see, we find little evidence of heterogeneity in the effects of family size by birth order in the sample considered here. 12 Most localities were chosen on the basis of having been graded with a high degree of marginalisation on the basis of the 1995 Census data.…”

“…Rosenzweig and Zhang (2009) highlight a number of concerns underlying the validity of this instrument (including differential birth endowments and birth intervals of twins versus singletons). The most likely direction of ensuing bias of the IV estimates is positive (Behrman et al 1994;Rosenzweig and Zhang 2009): we conducted an analysis using twin births as an instrument and found some positive IV estimates, leaving us with concerns that these issues may indeed be relevant in our context but are unfortunately not possible to investigate further given the available data. Finally, a third type of instrument exploits variation in implementation and enforcement of fertility policies as an instrument.…”

“…Further, with the exception of Lee (2008) for Korea, Ponczek and Souza (2012) for Brazil, the existing work on developing countries pertains to China, and findings are contradictory and difficult to extrapolate to other contexts given China's one child policy (Li et al 2008;Rosenzweig and Zhang 2009;Qian 2009). 2 Our paper contributes to this gap in the literature 1 There is an abundant literature showing that parents with large families invest less in children's education than parents with small families, but much of this evidence is non-causal.…”