Working Papers

"Take to the Road for the Newborn: The Effect of the Two-Child Policy on Internal Migration in China" (Job Market Paper 🔗)

Abstract: How do fertility choices shape households’ migration decisions? A large literature finds that migrants tend to have fewer children, typically by comparing migrants with non-migrants or by exploiting variation in moving costs to study how migration barriers influence fertility. In this paper, I reverse the channel and ask: how do fertility constraints affect migration? Using China’s shift from the One-Child to the Two-Child Policy as a natural experiment in a difference-in-differences design, I find that relaxing the fertility bound increases the probability that one spouse migrates by 3.10 percentage points, relative to a 16.45% baseline migration rate in the 2010 census. This result remains robust even after accounting for the contemporaneous policy of 2014 Hukou Reform. I argue that looser fertility constraints increase the expected number of children by couples, thereby strengthening their incentives for temporary migration to earn higher income and finance child-rearing costs. To interpret and quantify these dynamics, I develop and estimate a household-level dynamic joint discrete choice model of migration and fertility. The model predicts that further relaxing fertility limits (e.g., from the Three-Child Policy to full removal of restrictions) would have limited effects on both fertility and internal migration. In contrast, it shows that reducing non-financial migration barriers (e.g., the Hukou policy) would be a more effective channel for promoting both internal migration and fertility.

"One Child Policy and Marriage Market Outcomes" (with Yufeng Shi 🔗)

Abstract: This paper examines the impacts of China's One-Child Policy (OCP) fines on the marriage market outcomes. We develop a theoretical framework that connects fertility, marriage, and education decisions within an overlapping generations model with transferable utility. In particular, if higher OCP fines increase the advantage women with higher educational attainment who choose to enter the marriage market at a later stage over their counterparts with lower educational attainment in terms of the expected marriage gains, then more female decision-makers will choose to achieve higher educational attainment. We verify these connections using National Population Census of China and manually collected provincial data on expected OCP fines between 1979 and 2015. Among urban women in the ethnic majority group, a one-unit increase in average expected OCP fines, equivalent to a year of household income and averaged over ages 6 to 20, is associated with more than 10 percentage point increase in the probability of completing high-school. It is also associated with an approximately 5 percentage point wider gap in the later-stage probability of being matched between those with and without a high school diploma, which transfers into an expanding advantage in expected marriage gains for those who have completed the high school. By contrast, no significant effect is observed among their rural counterparts.