The Cost of Fertility in China: Do Chinese Women Postpone Their Fertility Decisions because Education Increases Their Related Opportunity Cost
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This research focuses on how education affects Chinese women’s fertility decisions. I hypothesize that enhanced access to education has led to a postponement of pregnancies among Chinese women and a decrease in the number of children they have. To test this hypothesis, I use data from the China Nutrition and Health Survey on 8319 women who have ever given birth in a set of standard OLS regression and Negative Binomial Regression models. My findings indicate women with higher levels of education give birth to their first child later in life. To verify this result, I perform a battery of robustness checks. In particular, using an instrumental variables approach relying on information on a woman’s siblings, I find that both education and individual annual income are significantly correlated with fertility decisions. Against this background, I argue that, Chinese decision makers need to find policy responses that account for the effects of education in order to boost births and counter existing adverse population dynamics.
THES
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Xiang, Yuchen
Kern, Andreas
2019
Master of Public Policy
47
Georgetown University
Ann Arbor
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