经济与金融系学术讨论会第210期

题目：Quarter of Birth, Gender Inequality, and Economic Development

演讲人：张皓辰（北京大学 博士研究生）

时间：2024年4月23日（周二）12:00-13:00

地点：同济大厦A楼505室

同步#腾讯会议：822482009

会议密码：730388

链接：https://meeting.tencent.com/dm/2XLbhBlIJcFo

摘要：This paper discovers that people born in the fourth quarter tend to have better lifecycle outcomes for 1930-1990 cohorts in China, and this birth quarter effect (BQE) is larger for females than males. Based on agricultural production statistics, we build a model in which seasonality in agricultural production, combined with son preference, leads to a gender gap in BQEs on child neonatal investment, and this gap decreases with economic development. We estimate the gender gap in BQEs on lifecycle outcomes and correlate the estimates with socioeconomic characteristics across provinces. To test the mechanism, we exploit weather shocks as a natural experiment for agricultural production and find that higher agricultural output in the previous year reduces the BQE and its gender gap in a given year of birth. Exploring China’s economic reform in 1979 as a quasi-experiment, we further find that the effect of previous-year agricultural output is mitigated by economic development. Furthermore, we find a gender gap in BQEs on infant breastfeeding, which is used as a proxy for child neonatal investment. Our findings demonstrate that economic development lessens the effect of poverty on gender inequality through the channel of neonatal investment.

简介： 张皓辰，北京大学新结构经济学研究院博士研究生。研究领域为发展经济学、劳动经济学和区域经济学。研究论文发表于Journal of Economic Geography、China Economic Review、《经济学》（季刊）等国内外学术期刊。