Does population control lead to better child quality? Evidence from China’s one-child policy enforcement

The Long-Term Consequences of Having Fewer Children in Old Age: Evidence from China's 'Later, Longer, Fewer' Campaign

“…In this subsection, we briefly describe China's family planning policies during the 1970s, prior to the enforcement of the well-known one-child policy (see Zhang (2017) for a recent review of the one-child policy). China's family planning has a much longer history than that of the one-child policy, dating back Leading Group to organize and lead the implementation of family planning policies.…”

“…Figure 1 plots the time series of China's total 5 There are several ways to exploit the one-child policy as an exogenous shock. Some examples include comparing fertility behavior before and after 1979 (Ahn 1994;Ding and Hesketh 2006;Whyte, Wang, and Cai 2015), using the year 1979 as the cut-off for a regression discontinuity design (Qin, Zhuang, and Yang 2017), analyzing fines imposed on above-quota births (McElroy and Yang 2000;Ebenstein 2010;Wei and Zhang 2011;Liu 2014;Huang, Lei, and Zhao 2016), examining the ex-post violations of the policy (Li and Zhang 2017;Zhang 2017), treating the minority as a control group (Li, Zhang, and Zhu 2005;Li, Yi, and Zhang 2011), and exploiting the rollout of family planning stations (Edlund et al 2013;Jia and Persson 2017). fertility rate and sex ratio at birth (the number of male children per 100 female children).…”

“…Second, this paper contributes to understanding the consequences of China's "Later, Longer, Fewer" campaign. There is a huge literature estimating the effect of China's family planning policies on various outcomes, including: savings rate (Banerjee, Meng, and Qian 2010;Wei and Zhang 2011;Curtis, Lugauer, and Mark 2015;Choukhmane, Coeurdacier, and Jin 2016;Ge, Yang, and Zhang 2018), marriage (Huang and Zhou 2015), labor supply (Huang 2016;Zhang 2017), children's outcomes (Li, Zhang, and Zhu 2008;Qian 2009;Liu 2014;Li and Zhang 2017;Qin, Zhuang, and Yang 2017), parental health (Chen and Lei 2009;Wu and Li 2012;Islam and Smyth 2015), rural-urban migration (Wang, Zhao, and Zhao 2017;Zhang 2017), and female empowerment (Huang 2016). However, the term "family planning policies" in those studies is almost identical to the "one-child policy."…”

“…For evidence of quantity-quality tradeoffs in China, seeLi, Zhang, and Zhu (2008);Rosenzweig and Zhang (2009);Li and Zhang (2017);Qin, Zhuang, and Yang (2017) …”

Spillovers in Childbearing Decisions and Fertility Transitions: Evidence from China

“…Our paper relates to the empirical literature on the eects of China's population policies on fertility and family outcomes. Most studies focus on the OCP (Li et al, 2005(Li et al, , 2011Ebenstein, 2010;Huang and Zhou, 2016;Li and Zhang, 2017;Liu, 2014;Qian, 2009;Wang and Zhang, 2018).…”