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Compensation for girls in early childhood and its long-run impact: family investment strategies under rainfall shocks

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Abstract

This study explores the effect of early-life rainfall shocks on the long-run performance of children of different genders and possible mechanisms. Using data from a nationwide Chinese survey, we find that rainfall in children’s year of birth increase girls’ long-term test scores and educational attainment, whereas boys are unaffected. Our analysis of potential mechanisms indicates that birthyear rainfall leads to longer duration of breastfeeding for girls. We also find that, in years with more rainfall, mothers work fewer hours on agricultural work and parents are less likely to agree that raising children is to provide support for themselves in old age. Further analysis shows that rainfall in the current year disproportionately affects private health insurance for girls, indicating that positive rainfall shocks are associated with an increased willingness to invest in girls.

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Notes

  1. Son preference in China is due mainly to two reasons. First, agricultural works reliesy mostly on the strength of males, which means that males have a higher labor market return. Second, a married couple usually resides with the family of the husband’s parents, and hence, sons can provide old-age support (Das Gupta et al. 2003). In this scenario, parents would unsurprisingly want to provide more resources to their sons than their daughters to maximize their long-run utility. China’s son preference is also reflected in the high male-to-female sex ratio, which exceeds the natural sex ratio (1.05–1.06) from 1980 when the one-child policy was enacted. Parents exercise sex-selective abortion before children are born (Almond et al. 2019). The introduction of ultrasound technology during the 1980s allowed parents to exercise this type of abortion.

  2. Blundell et al. (2018) formulate that, in a frictionless world, only a permanent component of the wage has wealth effects on labor choice and investment on children.

  3. According to 2010 population census of China, 61.67% and 70.66% of women and men have finished secondary school education.

  4. For example, Kudamatsu et al. (2012) find that drought shocks have a pronounced effect on infant deaths in Africa. Maccini and Yang (2009) show that early-life rainfall shocks change a household’s economic conditions.

  5. For example, Rose (1999) finds that positive rainfall shocks increase the survival rate of girls. Pathania (2007) finds that early-life rainfall increases the average height for upper-castes women but reduces height for lower-caste women in India. Dinkelman (2017) shows that the lack of rainfall from the fetal period to 4 years old increases disability rates of Africans in the long run. As far as educational and labor market outcomes, Aguilar and Vicarelli (2012) find that children who were exposed to extreme rainfall shocks during their first or second year of life have worse cognitive scores. Adhvaryu et al. (2018) find that rainfall shocks in the birthyear are correlated with children’s educational attainment and employment outcomes. Feeny et al. (2021) find that shocks experienced in the early life reduce the probability of formal sector employment for women.

  6. In the surveys conducted in 2010 and 2014, the CFPS used the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K6), which comprises six questions about the feeling of the respondents during the past 30 days. In the surveys of 2012 and 2016, the CFPS used the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale, which comprises 20 questions about the frequency of depression and related symptoms in the past week.

  7. These two variables are only recorded in the surveys of CFPS 2010 and 2012.

  8. We focus on children aged between 10 and 17 years old because CFPS only conducted Chinese language and math tests for respondents who are 10 or over. According to the General Rules of Civil Law of China, citizens aged 18 or over are considered as adults.

  9. One may concern whether our sample is still nationally representative after excluding the observations with missing information. To answer this question, we compare the mean of individual characteristics between the original sample and our analyzed sample. Table 10 shows the results. We find that the means of variables in our analyzed sample are quantitatively close to those in the original sample, implying that our analyzed sample is still nationally representative.

  10. According to the WHO, infants should be breastfed at least for six months because the breast milk in the first six months can improve the survival rate of newborns and are helpful to future human capital development.

  11. Information on access to tap water is only available in CFPS 2010 and 2014, and information on child labor only available in CFPS 2010.

  12. China has four seasons per year. Each season comprises three months. Specifically, spring is from March to May, summer is from June to August, autumn is from September to November, and winter is from December to February.

  13. We also define birthyear rainfall as the rainfall 12 months after a child was born. The estimated results upon request are quantitatively similar.

  14. In this study, “rainfall exposure” and “rainfall shock exposure” are used interchangeably.

  15. Considering that a family wants a boy, parents will continue having children until they have a son. In this sense, girls will have more siblings than boys.

  16. Educational attainment is coded as follows: 1 = illiteracy; 2 = primary school graduation; 3 = middle school graduation; 4 = junior high school graduation; 5 = three-year junior college graduation; 6 = bachelor’s degree; 7 = master’s degree; 8 = doctoral degree.

  17. We adjust family net income to real values in 2010 using the consumer price index.

  18. Parents’ ages are not controlled because parents’ age is collinear to childbearing age and their children’s age.

  19. We also use the standard errors clustered at the children’s birth county-cohort levels. All significant results hold. These results are available upon request.

  20. We detect no time trend of average rainfall shocks in our sample counties from 1970 to 2017.

  21. We will discuss the relation between rainfall and household income in detail below.

  22. Several studies find that rainfall increases agricultural production in China (Xie et al. 2020; Zhang and Carter 1997). Using the data from NMIC, we also find that rainfall increases crop yields.

  23. Some respondents report that their family income is 0. We add 1 to the income and take them in the logarithm.

  24. The sample size in column 5 is smaller than that in columns 1–4 because the regression in column 5 requires family incomes in three years of surveys are non-missing.

  25. According to Angrist and Pischke (2008), “bad controls” are those that can be potential dependent variables. Thus, including “bad controls” would cause selection bias.

  26. It is noted that rainfall can affect contemporary family incomes as shown in Table 2 (i.e., rainfall and family income are measured in the same year).

  27. The results are quite similar when we separately examine the effects of rainfall shocks from in utero to age 2.

  28. We find that the estimated coefficients on “Rainfall shocks in birthyear × Girl” are nearly unchanged when we add cohort, survey year, birth season, and county-specific time trend sequentially in the model, or when we estimate a model without controlling for parents’ and children’s characteristics. These results are available upon request.

  29. Nearly 2,325 (29.04% of the entire sample) children in the sample have one or more siblings between 10 and 17 years old.

  30. This result is significant at the 5% level when the standard errors are clustered at the birth county-cohort level.

  31. These two variables are recorded only in the surveys of CFPS 2010 and 2012.

  32. Our results are different from Rocha and Soares (2015), who show that negative rainfall shocks cause higher infant mortality and lower birth weight in Brazilian semiarid periods when water scarcity is a severe problem. The authors conjecture that the scarcity of drinkable water may be the underlying mechanism of the detected effect, which means that the extremely low rainfall is the main reason causing neonates’ low birth weight and a shorter duration of gestation. In comparison, we use a sample comprising both high and low rainfall years. Therefore, we cannot detect similar results to Rocha and Soares (2015).

  33. Educational attainment is an ordered variable introduced in Sect. 2.1. We use OLS to estimate Eq. (1). We also use ordered logit model to estimate the results, which are quantitatively similar.

  34. Maccini and Yang (2009) find that a 20% higher rainfall in the birthyear can improve a woman’s educational attainment by 0.22 years, which is about a 3.4% increase relative to the sample mean. Column 1 in Table 6 indicates the estimated coefficient on “Rainfall shocks in birthyear × Girl” is 0.092, implying that one standard deviation of birthyear rainfall shocks (is equivalent to 17% higher rainfall shocks) can improve a woman’s educational attainment by 9.2 percentage points. It amounts to a 2.5% increase relative to the sample mean. Therefore, our results on educational attainment are similar to Maccini and Yang (2009).

  35. Our result on health is different from Maccini and Yang (2009), who show that women with 20 percent higher rainfall in the birthyear are 3.8 percentage points less likely to self-report poor or very poor health. The authors also find that women attain 0.57 cm higher height.

  36. We do not add household fixed effects in this specification because parents’ views on parenting are the same for different children.

  37. We do not include family incomes as control variable when we analyze the contemporary effects of rainfall shocks by using Eq. (2) because rainfall can affect contemporary family incomes.

  38. For families with multiple children, approximately 33.8% and 34.3% of boys and girls possess private health insurance, respectively.

  39. In our sample, 91.3% of boys and 90% of girls are breastfed for more than six months as shown in Panel C of Table 1. The 1.3 percentage point difference transfers to 290 fewer girls who are not breastfed for more than six months than boys in our sample (the sample size is 8,001). If we consider the overall number of births in rural China, such a difference means nearly 3.17 million fewer girls who are not breastfed for more than six months than boys in 2019. In other words, given the large population in China, the 1.3 percentage point is not a small gap. Moreover, according to the National Health Services Survey of China, the average duration of breastfeeding is 6.7 months in rural China in 2003 (2003 is close to the average birthyear of children in our sample), implying that six months appears to be the choice for most rural parents breastfeeding their children. That is, children who are breastfed for six months can be considered as those who obtain optimal breastfeeding duration in rural China.

  40. The estimation equation is specified as follows: \({cohort\ size}_{crk}={\alpha}_{0}+{\alpha}_{1}\ {rain\ fall\ shocks}_{ck}+temperature_{ck}+{\lambda}_{c}+{\lambda}_{c}\bullet k+{\eta}_{k}+{\tau}_{r}+{\mu}_{crk}\), where \(cohort size_{crk}\) is the logarithm of the number of individuals in cohort k, survey year r, and county c. rain fall shocksck is the exposure of rainfall shocks for the cohort k in county c. \(\lambda_{\mathrm{c}}\) is a vector of the county fixed effects. \({\mathrm{\lambda }}_{\mathrm{c}}\bullet k\) is a vector representing the birth county-specific linear time trend. \(\eta_{k}\) is a vector of the cohort fixed effects which are used to capture age effects. \(\tau_{r}\) is a vector of survey year fixed effects, and \(\mu_{crk}\)  is the error term.

  41. All results in Table 9 are obtained with controlling for parents’ and children’s characteristics. Results are quite similar when these characteristics are excluded.

  42. According to the data released by the NMIC, 25–30 separate floods occurred from 1951 to 2017. Northern and western provinces barely suffer from floods.

  43. These results are available upon request.

  44. From the CFPS 2014, if a child answers the first question incorrectly, he/she will skip to an easier level to answer the following questions.

  45. The first method used to calculate the score is Guttman Scale, and the second method used to calculate the score is W-scale.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank editor Terra McKinnish and two reviewers for helpful comments. The authors acknowledge the funding support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72073051) and the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Grant No. 2021A1515012304). The views expressed in this article are solely the authors’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, Shandong University, Weihai, People’s Republic of China

    Jia Wu

  2. Weihai Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, Weihai, People’s Republic of China

    Jia Wu

  3. Department of Economics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China

    Jiada Lin

  4. Department of Economics, Nankai University, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China

    Xiao Han

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Appendix

Appendix

1.1 I. Chinese language and math test in CFPS

In surveys of 2010 and 2014, there are 8 sets of word problems that have similar difficulty. Each set is comprised of 34 Chinese characteristics marked by numbers. The 34 characteristics are printed on a card (a total number of 8 cards). Children are asked to read characteristics on a randomly chosen card. Characteristics are sequentially presented from easiest to hardest. To improve the efficiency of the survey procedure, CFPS assigns different start points of the tests to children with different educational levels.Footnote 44 If a child failed to read 3 characteristics in a row or finished the entire 34 problems, then he/she would be scored. The score is the question number of the hardest characteristic a child could correctly answer. Children are also asked to answer a randomly chosen set of math problems from four sets of problems with similar difficulty. Each set is comprised of 24 math problems, which contain questions about addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, exponents, logarithms, trigonometric functions, etc. Similar to the word test, on each card, 24 math problems are arranged from easiest to hardest and shown to children sequentially. The math achievement is scored according to the hardest problems that children answer correctly.

CFPS uses the other two tests to measure children’s Chinese language and math skills, that is, word recall and number series tests. These tests were conducted in surveys of 2012 and 2016. The design of the two tests follows the Health and Retirement Study in the U.S. Word recall test aims to elicit individuals’ memory ability. Individuals were given 10 words to read to the interviewees and were told to recall the words immediately (immediate memory) and after a few minutes (delayed memory). Individuals were given a second chance if they failed to recall any words. Scores are calculated according to the number of words that individuals correctly recalled.

The number series test uses a two-step procedure to measure individuals’ math ability. Individuals firstly answered 3 questions on number series in different difficulty levels in the first step. Based on the correctness of the three questions, children were further asked several questions in the second step. The scores were calculated according to the answers in the two steps.

In CFPS 2010 and 2014 surveys, we normalize Chinese language and math scores to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1 by survey year and individuals’ age. In CFPS 2012 and 2016 surveys, we first normalize immediate memory, delayed memory, and number series test scores by survey year and age. Next, we summarize the normalized immediate and delayed memory to obtain a comprehensive measure of Chinese language scores. In a similar way, we summary number series test scores measured by two methods to obtain a comprehensive measure of math scores.Footnote 45 We then normalize comprehensive word and math scores to have a mean of 0 and a standard deviation of 1.

1.2 II. Additional tables

Table 10 Change in Demographic Characteristics Across Samples
Full size table
Table 11 Summary Statistics of Rainfall Shocks and Temperature
Full size table
Table 12 Impact of Rainfall Shocks on Gender Difference in On-time Grade Progression
Full size table
Table 13 Impact of Early-Life Rainfall Shocks on Cohort Size, Female-to-male Ratio, Sex Ratio of Cohorts, and Migration
Full size table
Table 14 Impact of Rainfall Shocks Long Before Children’s Birth on Gender Difference in Test Scores
Full size table

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Wu, J., Lin, J. & Han, X. Compensation for girls in early childhood and its long-run impact: family investment strategies under rainfall shocks. J Popul Econ 36, 1225–1268 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-022-00901-5

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