Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/227221 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 13694
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper revisits the relationship between agricultural productivity shocks and the infant sex ratio in India and investigates how this relationship changes when households have access to government-provided employment opportunities outside of agriculture. When a household's preference for sons coincides with adverse agricultural productivity shocks, previous research shows that households tend to disproportionately reduce investments (prenatal and postnatal) in their female children. This behavior leads to a relatively more balanced sex ratio in good rainfall years and a more skewed sex ratio (in favor of boys) in inadequate rainfall years. In a deviation from past work, we find evidence of this primarily through prenatal channels in modern India. We then show that a workfare program that decouples both wages and consumption from rainfall attenuates the relationship between rainfall and the infant sex ratio. Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we find that the program could have saved at least 0.7 million girls – relative to boys – if the government had implemented it in 2001 to 2005. Additional results on postnatal channels show substantial impacts on the long-term health outcomes of surviving girls, as rainfall no longer differentially affects girls' height-for-age, relative to boys', following the program's implementation.
Subjects: 
sex ratio
child health
consumption smoothing
workfare program
India
JEL: 
H53
I15
I38
O12
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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