Stratified Fertility Responses to China’s Two-Child Policy
Details
About the Webinar:
This study examines whether and which couples respond to China’s recent family planning policy transition, ending the so-called “one (or one-point-five) child policy” era. The late-2013 “single-singleton two-child” policy created a unique setting for us to evaluate the two-child policy effects on promoting second-child births. This policy change primarily concerned couples of which one spouse is a singleton. These single-singleton couples, being restricted previously, became eligible for having two children. Meanwhile, the second-child eligibility for double-singleton and neither-singleton couples remained unaffected. I find the targeted single-singleton couples responded to the policy change immediately, with a higher probability of giving birth to a second child by late 2015 than other types of comparable couples. However, their two-child policy responses were systematically stratified by family socioeconomic characteristics, which highlights the significance of inequality in shaping Chinese couples’ fertility decision nowadays.
About the Speaker:
Hao Dong is a Peking University Boya Young Fellow and an Assistant Professor at the Center for Social Research, Guanghua School of Management. Prior to joining PKU, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Social Science from the HKUST in 2016. His research broadly concerns family demography, social stratification and mobility, and comparative historical demography. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Evolution and Human Behavior, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Social Science & Medicine, among other international academic journals, as well as top Chinese sociology and history journals, such as 社会学研究, 历史研究, and 社会. For more information, please visit his website: scholar.pku.edu.cn/haodong.
About the Webinar:
This study examines whether and which couples respond to China’s recent family planning policy transition, ending the so-called “one (or one-point-five) child policy” era. The late-2013 “single-singleton two-child” policy created a unique setting for us to evaluate the two-child policy effects on promoting second-child births. This policy change primarily concerned couples of which one spouse is a singleton. These single-singleton couples, being restricted previously, became eligible for having two children. Meanwhile, the second-child eligibility for double-singleton and neither-singleton couples remained unaffected. I find the targeted single-singleton couples responded to the policy change immediately, with a higher probability of giving birth to a second child by late 2015 than other types of comparable couples. However, their two-child policy responses were systematically stratified by family socioeconomic characteristics, which highlights the significance of inequality in shaping Chinese couples’ fertility decision nowadays.
About the Speaker:
Hao Dong is a Peking University Boya Young Fellow and an Assistant Professor at the Center for Social Research, Guanghua School of Management. Prior to joining PKU, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He received his PhD in Social Science from the HKUST in 2016. His research broadly concerns family demography, social stratification and mobility, and comparative historical demography. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Evolution and Human Behavior, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Social Science & Medicine, among other international academic journals, as well as top Chinese sociology and history journals, such as 社会学研究, 历史研究, and 社会. For more information, please visit his website: scholar.pku.edu.cn/haodong.