TY - JOUR
T1 - Why are Indian children so short? the role of birth order and son preference
AU - Jayachandran, Seema
AU - Pande, Rohini
N1 - Funding Information:
* Jayachandran: Department of Economics, Northwestern University, 2211 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208 (email: [email protected]); Pande: Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, Mailbox 46, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (email: [email protected]). We thank Patrick Agte, Alejandro Favela, Lydia Kim, Suanna Oh, and Alexander Persaud for excellent research assistance. We are grateful to Abhijit Banerjee, Jere Behrman, Diane Coffey, Angus Deaton, Rebecca Dizon-Ross, Jean Drèze, Erica Field, Dominic Leggett, Nachiket Mor, Debraj Ray, Dean Spears, Tomasz Strzalecki, Alessandro Tarozzi, several seminar participants, and three anonymous referees for helpful comments. We thank the International Growth Centre, National Science Foundation (Jayachandran) and Harvard’s Women and Public Policy Program (Pande) for funding. The authors declare that they have no relevant or material financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
PY - 2017/9
Y1 - 2017/9
N2 - Child stunting in India exceeds that in poorer regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Data on over 168,000 children show that, relative to Africa, India's height disadvantage increases sharply with birth order. We posit that India's steep birth order gradient is due to favoritism toward eldest sons, which affects parents' fertility decisions and resource allocation across children. We show that, within India, the gradient is steeper for high-son-preference regions and religions. The gradient also varies with sibling gender as predicted. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that India's steeper birth order gradient can explain over one-half of the India-Africa gap in average child height.
AB - Child stunting in India exceeds that in poorer regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Data on over 168,000 children show that, relative to Africa, India's height disadvantage increases sharply with birth order. We posit that India's steep birth order gradient is due to favoritism toward eldest sons, which affects parents' fertility decisions and resource allocation across children. We show that, within India, the gradient is steeper for high-son-preference regions and religions. The gradient also varies with sibling gender as predicted. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that India's steeper birth order gradient can explain over one-half of the India-Africa gap in average child height.
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U2 - 10.1257/aer.20151282
DO - 10.1257/aer.20151282
M3 - Article
C2 - 29558073
AN - SCOPUS:85029285108
SN - 0002-8282
VL - 107
SP - 2600
EP - 2629
JO - American Economic Review
JF - American Economic Review
IS - 9
ER -