Gender Imbalance and Educational Investments in China

Sammanfattning

An unintended consequence of the One Child Policy, introduced in 1979, has been the increasing sex ratio imbalance in China. This has resulted in millions of excess males, facing difficulties in finding a spouse. The increased marriage market competition has caused behavioral changes among males, motivated by an eagerness to increase their attractiveness towards potential partners. This paper seeks to examine whether individuals facing fiercer marriage market competition attain additional education as a strategy to improve their attractiveness. Human Capital Theory stipulates that education increases an individual's life-time earnings, thus we hypothesize that males faced with increased marriage market competition may use education as a strategy to acquire wealth and signal high-earnings potentials, as wealth has been proven to be an important determinant of an individual's marriage market attractiveness. Using data from 2010 China Family Panel Studies and 1990 and 2000 China Population Censuses, we investigate this relationship by using an Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Instrumental Variable (IV) approach. We found support for our hypothesis that higher gender imbalance results in increased educational attainment for males, although the economic significance is not excessively high. Surprisingly, we also found that the educational effect of the gender imbalance is in fact stronger for females than males. Similar research has been made in the 20th century US immigrant setting, but we contribute to existing research by extending the knowledge of the relationship to a Chinese 21st century context, a geographical and temporal research space which has so until now been unexplored.