Hide the Girls! One-Child Policy and Its Educational Consequences on the 'Unwanted' Births

Abstract To earn a quota for a boy under the one-child policy (OCP), some Chinese families intentionally underreport births of girls or delay their hukou registration, which can have subsequent consequences on them. Previous studies have found a decline in sex ratio of one given birth cohort over time and attribute this to the underreporting of girls. I first show that the enforcement of the OCP is significantly related to such a decline. I then explore temporal and regional variation of the OCP to examine its impact on school entrance age and educational attainment. The results show that the OCP significantly delayed school entrance and decreased years of schooling for both girls and boys. However, the effects are much larger for girls and only confined to rural people. This study provides new evidence in support of the underreporting and delayed registration of “unwanted” births in China and highlights the socioeconomic consequences of the OCP on those “unwanted” births.