Prenatal Health Investments: What's the Child's Gender got to do with it?
- Presenter:
Chair: James Burgess; Discussant: TBA Tue June 6, 2006 15:30-17:00 Room 213
How individuals invest in their own health, and how parental resource allocation decisions translate into investments in child health, have long been a concern among social scientists. This paper studies one class of parental investment decisions that combines the two, i.e. prenatal health investments that impacts maternal health, but may ultimately be viewed as investments in child health. A large body of literature documents how son preference impacts health investments in developing countries, and recent evidence suggests that parents in the U.S. are guided by son preference in their marriage, fertility, divorce and custody decisions too. In this paper we examine whether gender preference among American parents affect their prenatal health investments, an outcome which to date has not been studied in the gender preference context in either the US or abroad. We pay particular attention to testing whether male-biased child health investments persist among first generation immigrant mothers who were born in countries with a history of son preference. Data from the 1989-2001 U.S. Natality Detail Files and the 1988 National Maternal and Infant Health Survey are used to compare the prenatal investment decisions of mothers who have an ultrasound and eventually have a girl versus a boy. Information on mothers who do not have an ultrasound is used to control for innate differences that may arise due to fetal gender. We find that knowing fetal gender is female is not systematically associated with any differences in prenatal health investments among the U.S. population. What is most striking is that Indian and Chinese immigrant mothers also do not exhibit son preference in any of their prenatal investment decisions.
