Divorce, Abortion and Sex Ratio at Birth: The E¤ect of the Amended Divorce Law in China

This paper explores whether and to what extent the relative circumstances of men and women following marital dissolution a¤ect sex selection behavior within marriages. Chinas new divorce law, which was enacted in 2001, reduced divorce costs, especially for women, by granting the right to divorce and claim damages in the case of domestic violence and extra-marital relationships and by securing womens property rights upon divorce. I model the legal change as a decrease in womens divorce costs in a household in which all the marital surplus accrues to the husband. I show: (1) that the new divorce law predicts an increase in divorce rates after the birth of a daughter; (2) that the new law results in fewer sex-selective abortions for the second birth if the \u85rst birth produced a daughter; and (3) that the new law should have a diminishing marginal e¤ect on sex ratio, or that the sex ratio in historically low divorce regions should be a¤ected most. All the predictions are supported by the empirical evidence. Most importantly, I \u85nd that the majority of the decline occurred in provinces with divorce rates below the median. This result is both consistent with the predictions of the model and useful in ruling out concomitant changes in household income and the relative returns of male and female children