Intra-household bargaining power, surname inheritance, and human capital accumulation
- PDF / 961,644 Bytes
- 27 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 27 Downloads / 204 Views
Intra-household bargaining power, surname inheritance, and human capital accumulation Lixing Li 1 & Xiaoyu Wu 2
& Yi
Zhou 3
Received: 21 August 2019 / Accepted: 30 June 2020/ # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This research sheds light on the link between social norms and economic development. It explores the determinants of inheriting the mother’s surname in China and its implications for children’s health status and education outcomes. It establishes that children whose mothers are younger, more educated, and from regions with a lower sex ratio are more likely to be named after their mother. Moreover, these children have superior health and education outcomes, reflecting predominantly the impact of women’s higher bargaining power on children’s human capital accumulation. Keywords Surname inheritance . Intra-household bargaining . Human capital JEL classification D13 . I10 . I20
Responsible editor: Oded Galor
* Xiaoyu Wu [email protected] Lixing Li [email protected] Yi Zhou [email protected]
1
China Center for Economic Research, National School of Development, Peking University, Beijing, China
2
China Academy of Public Finance and Public Policy, Central University of Finance and Economics, 39 South College Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100081, China
3
Center for Social Research, Peking University, Beijing, China
L. Li et al.
1 Introduction Being named after one’s father is a long-standing tradition of most patriarchal societies. The dominant role of men in household decision-making and resource allocation is strengthened by the inheritance of the father’s surname by the next generation. In China, most families follow this tradition. However, the case of being named after the mother has become more frequent recently. Is this phenomenon related to an increase in female bargaining power, and does it improve children’s human capital accumulation? In this paper, we use microdata from China to answer these questions and shed new light on the link between social norms and economic development. The logic is as follows. Increases in women’s education and income improve their status and relative bargaining power in the family. Women’s bargaining power affects household outcomes, with outcomes closer to women’s preferences when women have more bargaining power. For example, families with a wife with more bargaining power generally have a lower expenditure share on male-favored goods, such as alcohol and cigarettes, and a higher expenditure share on female-favored goods, such as food and schooling (Thomas 1990; Hoddinott and Haddad 1995; Quisumbing and Maluccio 2003; Li and Wu 2011). A woman with more intra-household bargaining power presumably is more likely to be able to persuade her husband and her husband’s family to name children after her. Thus, having a child named after the mother may indicate higher maternal bargaining power. If women favor more investment than men in children’s human capital accumulation, then inheriting the mother’s surname may be correla
Data Loading...
