Risk Aversion and Son Preference: Experimental Evidence from Chinese Twin Parents
研究风险规避在父权社会中如何驱动儿子偏好，通过中国双胞胎父母的激励实验发现，更风险规避的父母更可能通过性别选择生儿子，且生儿子后父母风险规避程度显著降低。
We study the role of risk aversion underlying son preference in patriarchal societies, where sons serve as better insurance for old-age support than daughters. The implications of an insurance motive on son preference are twofold. First, prior to the birth of their children, more-risk-averse parents have a stronger preference for sons than for daughters. Second, after the birth of their children, parents with sons are more risk seeking, compared to parents with daughters. We adopt a within-twin-pair fixed-effects estimator with a weak identification assumption, which enables us to jointly identify these two effects. We further conduct an incentivized choice experiment to assess parental risk attitude in a sample of Chinese twins with children, and follow up with a second twin sample to examine the replicability of the findings. In both samples, we find that parents with higher risk aversion before the birth of their children are more likely to have sons through sex selection than parents with lower risk aversion. Additionally, having sons significantly decreases parental risk aversion. These results contribute to the literature on the sources of son preference and help shed light on the nature of gender inequality. Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2779 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.