Chains to Wings: The Unintended Family Planning Legacy on Intergenerational Mobility, with Qi Zhang.

This paper examines the impact of China’s family planning policies—the “later-longer-fewer” campaign and the one-child policy—on intergenerational mobility. Using a dataset of 2,096,978 child-parent pairs and leveraging regional variations in fines and political costs for policy violations, we find that provinces with higher fine rates and political costs exhibit higher mobility in income, education, and social class. These results are robust to a variety of checks, including the use of provincial secretaries and governors’ ages as instruments. Mobility gains are primarily driven by upward movement among children from families in the bottom 40% of the income, education, and social class distribution and downward movement among top-quintile families. We also observe that fines disproportionately reduce fertility among lower-income families, while political costs more effectively target political elites. However, differential fertility alone does not fully explain the mobility gains, as we do not find significant difference in mobility emerges between elite and non-elite families. Our analysis identifies two key mechanisms driving these outcomes: resource concentration among lower-income families and elite succession attenuation.

The previous version, titled "A Grand Reshuffling: The One-Child Policy and Intergenerational Mobility in China," was presented at the NBER Chinese Economy Working Group Meeting, PacDev, NWDW, and WSU Seminar Series.