No Deed, No Dates: Sex Ratio, Network Interactions and Parental Risk-taking in Rural China

Some Asian countries have experienced increasingly surplus of men in the marriageable age cohort. The existing literature on its impacts uses aggregate sex ratio. However, the relevance of skewed sex ratio to family decisions mainly relies on how social interactions in the reference group convey this pressure. This paper adopts a unique social network data, collected from households' long term spontaneous gift exchange records, with a primary census-type household panel data from Chinese villages to explore the prevalence of men's localized pressure to get married. We focus on comparing families with their first-born child a boy versus a girl and distinguish the network spillover effect from the direct effect. The spatial econometric decompositions suggest that the pressure mainly originates from a few friends with unmarried son and are faced with unbalanced sex ratios in the friendship networks, though own village sex ratio and having unmarried son also affect parental risk-taking behavior. We also find similar patterns for parental working hours, their likelihood to engage in entrepreneurial activities and decision to migrate. Since the sex ratio imbalance in China will probably worsen in the next decade, disentangling the real sources of marriage market pressure may help design targeting policy to improve parental well-being.