Do families spend more on boys than on girls? Empirical evidence from rural China

The issue of gender bias bears both theoretical significance and policy relevance. Using a household level dataset obtained from the China Standards of Living Survey 1995, this paper tests the gender bias hypothesis in terms of household consumption expenditures in rural China. To the contrary of the general impression that Chinese people have a strong cultural preference for sons, we do not find any strong evidence to support the hypothesis that boys are favored in rural China. We subject our baseline results to robustness checks from the implications of the bargaining approach and the preference for sons argument.