Zhao, Menghan
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Publication Effects of Birth Control Policies on Women’s Age at First Birth in China(2016-03-08) Zhao, Menghan; Kohler, Hans-PeterThe end of the “one-child” policy in China has brought the discussion of how much birth control policies have actually affected women’s childbearing behavior back into the spotlight. Some people suggest that birth control policies explain most of the fertility decline in China, but others believe that socioeconomic development has also played a decisive role. To shed light on these questions, instead of analyzing the impacts of policies on the overall level of fertility directly, we explore the effects of different local birth control policies on another aspect of childbearing behavior, timing of first birth. This study yields two significant findings. First, women who followed less strict birth control policies tended to have their first birth earlier than those who followed the strictest one-child policy. Second, concurrent with educational expansion, there was more heterogeneity in fertility intentions and variation in birth control policies among younger, higher-educated cohorts than their older, less-educated counterparts. Together, these imply that the effect of birth control policies was still strong, even for more educated young women. The Chinese fertility rate might see a temporal rise under the newly loosened birth control policy while the trend to low fertility will continue in the medium to long term.Publication Chinese Fertility: Past, Present And Future(2018-01-01) Zhao, MenghanChina has witnessed profound socioeconomic changes over the past four decades. This dissertation is comprised of three papers that investigate the demographic, social, and economic determinants of fertility trends in China. In Chapter 1, I discuss how birth control policies, which have been implemented since 1980, are related to Chinese women’s timing of giving first birth during a period with substantial socioeconomic development. The results suggest that such birth control policies still influence women’s childbearing behavior, even after controlling for the urban/rural distinction and provincial variation; however, this influence has diminished over time. In Chapter 2, I examine the relationship between different motherhood stages and urban women’s economic positions in the labor market between 1991 and 2011, and how this relationship has changed with the development of local economies. The analysis shows that very young children have an inhibiting effect on mothers’ labor force activities, and this effect is exaggerated with the development of local economies. On the other hand, women’s income is positively correlated with the presence of school-aged children, but this positive relationship is eroded with local economic development. In Chapter 3, I propose that the legacies from state socialism, the reduction in educational gender inequality, and the marketization process lead to a modern-traditional mosaic that shapes a curvilinear relationship between gender-role ideology and fertility intentions in China. Capitalizing on three waves of data from the Chinese General Social Survey, I empirically explore the relationship between women’s fertility intentions of having two or more children and different gender-role attitudes by using structural equation modeling. The results suggest that both the ‘modern’ (with more egalitarian gender-role ideology) and ‘traditional’ (with less egalitarian gender-role ideology) women show higher fertility intentions.