The Effect Of Gender Wage Gap On Family Fertility In China

In China,narrowing the gender wage gap and promoting fertility are two important policy goals.The realization of these two goals will not only help promote gender equality and enhance social equity and justice,but also help realize the long-term coordinated and balanced development between population and economy.So can the goals of narrowing the gender wage gap and promoting fertility be met at the same time?If narrowing the gender wage gap ends up discouraging family fertility,by what mechanism would it work?And is it possible to have both?This paper gives systematic and comprehensive answers to these questions both theoretically and empirically.This paper firstly constructs a family bargaining model including the number of children,gender preference,investment in children’s education,child-rearing pattern and other factors within the framework of collective model,and investigates the logical mechanism of gender wage gap affecting family fertility theoretically.The theoretical results show that when the degree of marketization of childcare services is low and the complementarity of the time investment of couples in childcare are low,so that most of the childcare responsibilities are borne by women,the reduction of gender wage gap can reduce the number of family births through the boy preference mechanism,the quantityquality substitution mechanism and the opportunity cost mechanism.Based on the theoretical model,this paper examines the impact of the gender wage gap on the number of births using China Household Tracking Survey(CFPS)data,and finds that narrowing the gender wage gap has significantly reduced the number of births in households.This means that there is a conflict between narrowing the gender wage gap and promoting fertility,which is not conducive to the realization of these two policy goals at the same time.How does narrowing of gender wage gap reduce the number of births?M echanism test shows that narrowing the gender wage gap can reduce the number of family births by weakening preference for boys,increasing investment in children’s education and increase the opportunity cost of childbearing.Further,is it possible to reduce the gender wage gap and boost fertility simultaneously?The results of the "U-shaped"relationship test show that there is no "U-shaped" relationship between the gender wage gap and the number of births,which may be due to the difficulty of transferring women’s childcare responsibilities to their spouses or to the childcare market.This paper makes four main contributions.Firstly,domestic studies on the gender wage gap mainly focus on its causes,and few pay attention to its social and economic consequences,this paper makes an attempt in this aspect.Secondly,the existing studies on the relationship between the gender wage gap and household fertility mainly focus on the theoretical aspect,while the few empirical studies mainly focus on western developed countries.This paper not only constructs a theoretical model,but also provides empirical evidence that the gender wage gap affects household fertility in China.Thirdly,the answer to the question about how the gender wage gap affects fertility behavior mainly focuses on the opportunity cost of fertility and the quantity-quality substitution mechanism.On this basis,this paper further investigates the mechanism of boys’ preference and the educational bargaining effect caused by the parents’ educational preferences difference,which will also cause the quantity-quality substitution of children.Finally,this paper preliminarily discusses the existence of the "U-shaped" relationship between the gender wage gap and the number of household births in China and the formation conditions of the "U-shaped"relationship,which provides a direction for China to achieve the two policy goals of promoting gender equality and increasing fertility rate at the same time.This paper shows that promoting the equal sharing of family childcare responsibilities and accelerating the construction of the universal childcare service system are conducive to narrowing the gender wage gap and promoting family fertility at the same time.