Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/288175 
Year of Publication: 
2023
Citation: 
[Journal:] Economics of Transition and Institutional Change [ISSN:] 2577-6983 [Volume:] 32 [Issue:] 1 [Publisher:] Wiley [Place:] Hoboken, NJ [Year:] 2023 [Pages:] 237-263
Publisher: 
Wiley, Hoboken, NJ
Abstract: 
Parental gender preferences may affect partnership decisions and as a result lead to early life disadvantages. We study these preferences in five post‐communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, a region with strong traditional gender norms and persisting inequalities between women and men in labour market outcomes. Using subsamples of census from Belarus, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Russia around 2000 and 2010, we follow Dahl and Moretti (2008), The demand for sons, to examine the effect of the gender of the first‐born child(ren) on fertility decisions and relationship stability of their parents. We only find strong evidence of ‘boy preferences’ in fertility decisions in the cases of Romania and Russia. However, unlike Dahl and Moretti (2008), The demand for sons, for the US, we cannot confirm a relationship between the children's gender and parental partnership decisions. This is the case for all examined Central and Eastern European countries, as well as for a number of countries from Western Europe. The cases of Romania and Russia raise questions about other potential consequences of the documented gender preferences. We argue that our approach can be applied more broadly to identify other countries characterised by parental gender preferences, and to motivate further examination of different forms of gender driven early life disadvantages.
Subjects: 
early life discrimination
family structure
fertility decisions
parental gender preferences
transition countries
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Article
Document Version: 
Published Version

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