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Does the Family’s Investments in the First child Affects the Decision to Give Birth to a second child?

Zexu Wang, Asian Demographic Research Institute,Shanghai University

The low fertility rate followed by the family planning policy in China had been widely concerned for many years. Trying to boost China's fertility rate, the Chinese central government formally replaced the one-child policy with the universal two-child policy in 2015. Under the background, a core question is that without the policy restrain, what factors affect the family's fertility decision to give birth to a second child. This paper follows Gary Becker's children's quantity-quality substitute theory, trying to explore this question in the family scope. The paper proposes that the more the family invests in the first child, the less likely they will give birth to a second child. This paper uses a sample data called China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), and multilevel logistic regression is applied. The family's characteristics and the province's trait where the family lives are included to examine the impact from different levels. Compared with educational investment and education expectations, the result finds that lack of time to raise children is the main reason to prevent second birth. The study also finds a moderate variation of the probability of having a second birth among the provinces, indicating that the provincial variables' impact should be noticed.

Keywords: Family planning and contraception, Multi-level modeling

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  Presented in Session 179. Fertility Transition and Prospects