The One Child Policy and Fertility among Chinese Immigrants

Until just recently, the One Child Policy (OCP) in China held Chinese fertility to dramatically low level.  In this paper we examine how the OCP has affected the subsequent fertility of Chinese women.  To examine fertility in an environment of unrestricted fertility, we conduct our analyses on migrants to the U.S. Using data from the American Community Survey (2001-2012) we estimate a difference-in-differences model that compares fertility of Chinese-born women born before and after the OCP with the fertility of women from other Asian countries from the same birth cohorts.  Our results indicate that Chinese women born after the OCP have significantly lower fertility compared to similar women born before the OCP.  These results lend support to the notion that women born into smaller families have lower fertility.  These findings are robust to a number of specification checks.