General Seminar - Simon Chang

When Brides Are Scarce: Marriage Competition and Sons’ Schooling in China

Parents invest in their children’s futures through both education and wealth for marriage. We study how competition in the marriage market changes the balance between the two. In our model, parents pay for schooling while their child is young, before they know how far the child will progress, and build marriage wealth later, when the child is about to marry. When men outnumber women and the groom’s family supplies the marriage wealth, competition raises the value of resources available when a son marries. Because a son’s future earnings cannot be borrowed against to pay for a home or a bride price, educating him becomes more costly, most of all for parents of modest means. We test these predictions using the China Family Panel Studies and an instrument that interacts the spread of prenatal ultrasound with historical son preference across provinces. One additional man per 100 women in a boy’s city and birth cohort lowers his probability of completing junior high school by 6.4 percentage points. For girls, the estimate is small and statistically insignificant, and the difference between boys and girls is significant. We find no significant effects at the senior-high or college levels. The decline is largest among sons of fathers with primary schooling and of farmers, although differences across families are imprecisely estimated.