Great Famine, Differential Fertility, and Income Inequality: Evidence from China
40 Pages Posted: 17 Jan 2022 Last revised: 4 Mar 2024
Date Written: January 16, 2022
Abstract
With China’s Great Famine (1959–1961) as an exogenous shock to the country’s post-Famine fertility structure and rural–urban population composition, we empirically identify the causal effect of differential fertility across income classes on the income inequality of the next generation. We find that a higher rural population share induces a higher Gini coefficient for these cohorts several decades later. Further mechanism analysis shows that a higher rural population share induces a lower probability of rural youths gaining admission to college and senior high school, that is, a higher rural fertility reduces social mobility.
Keywords: Differential fertility, income inequality, Great Famine, population composition, social mobility
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