Sex Ratio, Marriage Competition and Education Investment in China

High sex ratios, defined as the number of men divided by the number of women conditional on age, have alarmed the Chinese government and scholars since the 1980s. This national phenomenon is expected to have a profound impact on economic growth and social development, particularly the highly competitive marriage market.

In traditional Chinese culture, parents take the next generations’ success as their own responsibility, especially in terms of marriage. Accordingly, parents are willing to forgo their own consumption to invest in their children’s education in order to enable them to gain more advantages for finding a suitable mate in the future. However, the significance of investment in education for male and female offspring could diverge, because of their different statuses in the marriage market. Facing rising sex ratios, women are the privileged group while men face more challenges. Consequently, parents who have sons may be more willing to make their children attend high school and continue on to college. In contrast, parents with daughters have less motivation to send their children to school due to women’s privileged position in the marriage market. Thus, based on the fact that returns of education are higher for men, promising marriage opportunities reduce women’s incentive to invest in education because the same benefits derived from education can be obtained from less costly participation in the marriage market. Meanwhile, an excessive male population may intensify pressure on the labor market, which will increase competition for women in the job market. Therefore, women also require higher education in order to find a good job. Thus, these two strengths may offset, leaving the effects on female’s education input far not to reach an agreement.

This paper explores how parents invest in children’s education in order to improve their relative competiveness for marriage. Chinese parents increase investment in their children’s education in response to foreseeable mating competition, which is the result of male-biased sex ratios. Using household data from 155 counties in China, it is apparent that a high sex ratio induces parents in rural areas to invest more in their son’s education. For instance, one standard deviation increase in the sex ratio raises the rate of male school enrollment by 2.3 percent and education expenditure by 12 percent. On the contrary, the same increase in the sex ratio lowers the enrollment rate for girls in urban areas, those who are the chief benefactors of the current gender ratios, by 2.8 percent.