Sons, Daughters, and Parental Behaviour

The prevalence of son preference and its implications for familybehaviour in developing countries have received a great dealof scholarly attention, but child-gender bias is believed tobe empirically unimportant in wealthy, non-traditional societies.Studies by sociologists and psychologists during the past 30years, however, have documented consistent discrepancies betweenthe behaviour of parents of sons and parents of daughters—boystend to increase marital stability and marital satisfactionrelative to girls, and fathers spend more time with, and aremore involved with, sons than daughters. In recent years, economistshave begun to contribute to the child-gender literature, re-examiningthe effects of sons and daughters on family structure and parentalinvolvement with larger samples and greater concern for possiblesources of selection bias. Other economic outcomes, such asmarket work and earnings, have also been studied, and some investigatorshave exploited the randomness of child gender as a source ofexogenous variation in parental behaviour. In general, recentresults suggest that child gender does affect family stabilityand the time allocation of parents, but it is not clear whetherthese responses reflect parental preferences for boys ratherthan girls or differences in the constraints parents face. Footnotes ¹ E-mail address: lundberg{at}u.washington.edu