Sex Ratio Imbalance With China Marriage Patterns Change (1952-2006),

With the economic reform bringing the steady accumulation of wealth and many social problems, especially income inequality and asset prices’inflation,"economic status, physical factor" has been playing an important role in young people’s mate selection. This paper will utilize CGSS2006data to find that since the1950s, the homogeneous matching was the main matching mode as a whole, but from the perspective of time trends, this kind of matching reached its peak in the1980s, then declined continuously, meanwhile, the non-homogeneous matching is increasing, of which, female marrying up is the primary.At the same time, our country began One Child Policy in the late1970s, and established it as the basic state policy in1978, then formally implemented and executed strictly in the1980s. Combined with Chinese traditional son preference and the wide application of medical technology Ultrasonic B, many girls were missing and sex ratio of male-to-female went imbalance.We think that the imbalance of sex ratio brought by OCP as a kind of exogenous policy shock is an important reason of the changing of China’s marriage matching pattern. The intuition is as follows. The economic market reform enhances the heterogeneity among people, and the OCP leads to the imbalance of sex ratio--more boys than girls. The more serious the imbalance of sex ratio in marriage market, the more intense competition between men is, while the more bargaining power women have. Assuming at first the economic and non-economic conditions between men and women are homogeneous, the competition between men and the bargaining power handed in the women make the conditions of men generally better than women, eventually lead to the conditions of married husband are better than his wife, that is, female marrying up.The main purpose of this paper is to give empirical evidence to this mechanism. Considering sex ratio may be endogenous, we use fines as instrumental variable, and the results show that the mechanism does exist. We also test the relationship between the economic factors matching and the non-economic factors matching, to examine whether non-economic factors are still important during the process of marketization, and the results show that the effect of hukou is still important, while the occupation is an alternative of economic conditions. In addition, this paper examines whether the imbalance of sex ratio can affect the household resources allocation, the results indicate that the sex ratio imbalance not only can improve women’s bargaining power in marriage formation, but also can improve the wife’s status in the family life.