The Impact Of Children's Gender Structure On Family Risk Financial Asset Allocatio

This paper mainly studies the impact of children’s gender structure on the allocation of family’s risky financial assets and the channels of this impact under the current gender concept and social customs in China.Our data is from the 2017 China Household Finance Survey.After cleaning the questionnaire data,23443 family data complying with the research backgrounds and variable requirements are obtained.The proportion of male in the offspring is used as the proxy variable of children’s gender structure,and the dummy of whether the family participates in the risky financial assets and the proportion of risk financial assets are used as the proxy variables of family’s risky financial asset allocation.Using Logit and Tobit model,it is found that when controlling the other variables,the increase of the proportion of male in the family’s offspring will lead to a significant decrease in the probability of holding risky financial assets,and the proportion of risky financial assets will also decrease significantly.This result is still robust when using the one-child families as sub-sample to run the regression and using the stock market participation to replace the participation in the risky financial asset market.The path of this significant negative impact comes from the differences in the status of men and women in the marriage market and social customs,which lead to the need for parents to increase the holding of fixed assets such as real estate for their sons,thus crowding out the family’s financial assets,especially risky financial assets.To solve the endogenous problem,this paper also uses the penalty for violating family planning policy as the instrumental variable to estimate the effect.The result is still significant in the instrumental variable regression.Considering the impact of children’s gender structure on the purpose of investment considered by the family,the increase of the proportion of sons in the children will significantly increase the possibility of family to investment for the purpose of buying houses and cars,and significantly reduce the investment demand for education,medical treatment and retirement.This is because under the current social concepts,parents expect more pension support from their sons.The mechanism is that the increase in the proportion of sons in children does not directly affect the asset allocation through consumption.The significant negative impact comes from the differences in the status of men and women in the marriage market,which leads to the need for parents to increase the investment in fixed assets such as real estate for their sons to increase their competitiveness in the marriage market.When the available investment amount is fixed,the capital available for investment in risky financial assets is reduced.Through the heterogeneity analysis,it is found that when the age of householder is less than 50,the coefficient of children’s gender structure on the allocation of family risky financial assets is small and not significant.Because the children in the family are young and far away from accessing the marriage market.In the two groups with older householders,the results are significant.Because the children are gradually approaching the entry of marriage market,the families who have sons will increase the holding of real estate,and then reduce the holding of risky financial assets.At the same time,it may also because that the parents who are relatively younger have been less affected by the concept of "prefer sons to daughters",so the influence of children’s gender differences is not significant.For the heterogeneity analysis for urban and rural samples,it is found that,compared with urban families,the number and proportion of sons in rural families have a greater crowding out effect on risky financial assets.When the number and proportion of sons increase,the probability of holding risky financial assets in rural families decreases more.On the one hand,males in rural areas face harder competition in the marriage market,and parents have stronger motivation to allocate real estate for their sons.On the other hand,the concept of " prefer sons to daughters " in rural areas is more serious,so they are more strongly affected by the number and proportion of sons.