The economic behavior of the family in contemporary China: Private transfers, intrafamily resource allocation, and preference for sons.

The purpose of this dissertation is to shed light on the economic behavior of contemporary Chinese families, and especially to test in the Chinese context the empirical validity of some of the theories of family behavior developed by economists. The data set used in the analysis comes from a 1989 survey of more than 9,000 urban families and 10,000 rural families residing across China. The first issue that I address is the nature and size of private monetary transfers in rural areas and the motives behind these transfers. The empirical analysis shows that altruism alone is unlikely to explain the observed transfers and that self-interest may be involved. Most of the transfers are shown to be from adult children to parents. I suggest that taking care of grandchildren may be the main service provided by parents to children in exchange for money. The following chapter examines the issue of intrafamily resource allocation. Chinese parents are often believed to allocate greater shares of family resources to sons than to daughters. Boys might be favored because they are expected to make more pecuniary transfers to the family once they become adults. I present a model of intrafamily resource allocation for China, and I show that the estimates for urban areas lend support to the idea of this allocation being driven by expectations of future earning opportunities of children. Preference for sons is analyzed further in the following chapter, in which I look directly at male/female ratios. These ratios are much higher in China than in most Western countries, a phenomenon often attributed to abortion of female fetuses and female infanticide. The motivation for son preference is studied by looking at the effect of the economic status of the family on a surviving child's gender. I find that in rural areas surviving children of higher-income parents are more likely to be male, an indication that economic need is unlikely to be the main underlying cause of preference for sons. I also find that the number and gender of elder siblings are crucial determinants of the gender of surviving children.Ph.D.EconomicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105145/1/9635603.pdfDescription of 9635603.pdf : Restricted to UM users only