Superstition, Fertility, and Interethnic Spillovers: Evidence from Peninsular Malaysia

Abstract

This paper documents a strong correlation between fertility and superstition among the Chinese ethnic diaspora in Malaysia and examines the effect of this Chinese adherence to their cultural norm on the fertility behavior and economic outcomes of ethnic Malays. We exploit a short-term change in fertility preferences induced by the Chinese zodiac calendar that leads to a 14.3 percent rise in birth rates during auspicious dragon years. In contrast, Malays-who do not adhere to this belief-reduce their fertility by 1.9 percent during dragon years. Declines in Malay births are larger in areas with relatively fewer public resources and investment, providing suggestive evidence that economic factors related to child well-being, such as demographic pressure on resources, drive Malay fertility responses. We also document worse health outcomes at birth for Malays born in dragon years and lower educational outcomes in later life. Lastly, we find spatial heterogeneity in health effects and an overall increase in student-teacher ratios that are consistent with an increased resource burden imposed by dragon cohorts.

Fortunes and misfortunes of the dragon sons: Direct and cohort effects of superstition on education attainment

“…Several suggest the increase in fertility has to do with the zodiac superstition (Agarwal et al, 2017;Goodkind, 1991;Mocan & Yu, 2020). 4 Other authors also found impacts on sex ratio (Grech, 2015), female labor supply (Vere, 2008), and fertility and health outcomes of non-believing groups (Beam & Shrestha, 2020).…”

“…I estimate the magnitude of dragon and tiger years by running OLS regression of log cohort sizes on dummies for dragon/tiger years and a quadratic time trend. I focus on cohorts born after 1970 as previous researchers have suggested (Beam & Shrestha, 2020; Goodkind, 1991). The top panel of Table 1 presents the estimates on live birth cohort sizes while the bottom panel presents the estimates on school cohort sizes, measured as number of first grade students.…”