The Impact Of Gender Preference On Migrant Parental Economic Behavior

As a part of traditional ideology, the gender preference on child still deeplyaffects Chinese thoughts and behaviors. Since reform and opening up, the familyplanning policy issued by our government has indeed reduced the pressures frompopulation growth on the economy, energy and environments, but also provided thesoil of gender preference to a great extent.Since our government gradually relaxed the rural-urban segmentation allowingthe surplus rural labors entering cities and towns, hundreds of millions of peasantsleft their home, entered the urban and became modern industry workers. However, asthe result of the strong traditions and barriers like the household registration system,the majority hasn’t absolutely completed the migration, but to constantly shuttlebetween their hometown and working places.“Left-behind children”,“migrantchildren’s education in cities” and so on profoundly influence the economicbehaviors of migrant parents. By this paper, we are trying to make a tentative studythat whether the gender preference on child would impact the migrant parents’economic behaviors.We coherently used document and empirical research in this paper. In order tobe able to accurately grasp the direction of this research, we selected the economicbehaviors as our main research objects, namely the labor supply behavior (in thispaper we specifically choose working time), the consumer behavior and theremittance behavior; we worked with the child gender of one-child family, and thesecond child gender of two-child family controlled the first as a girl as the proxyvariables of gender preference and the key independent variables as well. We putforward three hypotheses after literature review. Namely in families with migrantworkers, parents work more hours, consume more, and remit more if their child is aboy instead of a girl.The main conclusions are as follows. Firstly, one-boy family has a significant positive correlation with parental working hours, but both number effect and ordereffect of two-child family don’t. Secondly, parental consumer behaviors of two-childfamily have a significant positive correlation with the second child gender controlledthe first as a girl, while the correlation is negative if the second boy lives in ruralareas. Thirdly, for both one-child and two-child family, there is no significantcorrelation between gender preference and parental remittance behaviors. Thus, thefirst and the second hypotheses of this paper have been sustained by the result ofregressions, but the third doesn’t get the support.In the results, part of the control variables is identical with literature, includingthe income effect of the wage earnings, the return on the gender of parents and thehuman capital based on the length of education. Others manifest this paper withsome relatively independent points of view. Such as, Living with spouse willincrease both working time and consumption level; boys living with their parentswill significantly improve parents’ labor supply as well as the family’s consumptionin urban areas; though the boys living in the countryside cannot significantly increasetheir parents’ remittance, the direction are still consistent with former empiricalanalyses. In addition, the influence of job nature to parental working time is alsoobvious.