Do Population Control Policies Induce More Human Capital Investment? Twins, Birthweight, and China's 'One Child' Policy

By Mark R. Rosenzweig, Junsen Zhang. Social Science Research Network, 2009

611 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we use a new data set describing households with and without twin children in China to quantify the trade-off between the quality and quantity of children using the incidence of twins that for the first time takes into account effects associated with the lower birthweight and closer-spacing of twins compared to singleton births. We show that examining the effects of twinning by birth order, net of the effects stemming from the birthweight deficit of twins, can provide upper and lower bounds on the trade-off between family size and average child quality. Our estimates indicate that, at least in one area of China, an extra child at parity one or at parity two, net of birthweight effects, significantly decreases the schooling progress, the expected college enrollment, grades in school and the assessed health of all children in the family. We also show that estimates of the effects of twinning at higher parities on the outcomes of older children in prior studies do not identify family size effects but are confounded by inter-child allocation effects because of the birthweight deficit of twins. Despite the evident significant trade-off between number of children and child quality in China, however, the findings suggest that the contribution of the one-child policy in China to the development of its human capital was modest.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/54f83479bba89324d47a9a4d7c15fe4a04b68219

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Citations in the corpus

Family size and child outcomes: Is there really no trade-off? (2010, background): “Rosenzweig and Zhang (2006) find negative effects on parental investments in education in China.”
THE DETERMINANTS OF HUMAN CAPITAL FORMATION DURING THE EARLY YEARS OF LIFE: THEORY, MEASUREMENT, AND POLICIES (2015, background): “…special case of within-household allocation of resources.11 Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1988) find some evidence in favor of Griliches’ conjecture, while Rosenzweig and Zhang (2009) find that parents in China exhibit higher education expenditure on children with higher birth weight, therefore…”
Multiple Experiments for the Causal Link between the Quantity and Quality of Children (2010, positive): “Because twins probably differ from non-twins for reasons both observed and unobserved, we prefer empirical strategies that look at the effects of twins on older siblings.4 Nevertheless, we also briefly discuss results from the Rosenzweig and Zhang (2009) approach.”
Testing the quantity–quality model of fertility: Estimation using unrestricted family size models (2016, background): “In any case, the argument of Rosenzweig and Zhang (2009) does not explain our findings of a nonmonotonic relationship between family size and child outcome; neither does it rationalize our evidence of the positive effect of family size in small families.”
Parents’ Beliefs about Their Children’s Academic Ability: Implications for Educational Investments (2019, positive): “Finally, the paper contributes to a large literature examining how parents’ investments depend on their children’s ability (e.g., Behrman et al., 1994; Griliches, 1979; Datar et al., 2010; Almond and Currie, 2011; Akresh et al., 2012; Bharadwaj et al., 2013; Rosenzweig and Zhang, 2009).”