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“Take My Mother-in-law…Please!”

A Study of the Impact of Women’s Bargaining Power on the Co-residence Decision in China

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Abstract

This paper investigated the effect of the wife’s bargaining power on the decision about intergenerational co-residence in China (i.e., whether she lived with the husband’s mother or not). Using the China Health and Nutrition Survey data from 2000, this paper found evidence in favor of women’s empowerment: the increase in women’s bargaining power. Specifically, greater education and a more prestigious occupation for women, relative to their husbands’, significantly reduced the probability of living with their mothers-in-law. The effect was particularly strong in urban areas.

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Notes

  1. The nuclear family is defined as a family group with adults (husband and wife), and their children. This is in contrast to the extended family that also includes intergenerational members, such as the elderly parents.

  2. The website of China Health and Nutrition Survey: http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/china.

  3. The nine provinces included four eastern coastal provinces and five inland provinces in the middle of China. The four eastern coastal provinces were Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, and Shandong. The five inland provinces were Henan, Hubei, Hunan, Guangxi, and Guizhou.

  4. For those mothers-in-law coresiding with their daughters-in-law, 69 % of them had living spouses (fathers-in-law), and 96 % of the fathers-in-law also lived together in the same house.

  5. For those mothers-in-law who were not coresiding with their daughters-in-law, 44 % of the mothers-in-law were living next door or adjacent to household; 24 % were living in the same neighborhood/village; 24 % were living outside the neighborhood, but the same city or county; and 8 % were living in a different city or county. Of mothers-in-law not coresiding with their daughters-in-law, 70 % had spouses (fathers-in-law) were still alive.

  6. In the data, there was information about the year in which the couple was married. marrytime was calculated by using the wave year (which is 2000) minus the married year.

  7. The highest level of education attained included 6 categories: 1—graduated from primary school, 2—lower middle school degree, 3—upper middle school degree, 4—technical or vocational degree, 5—university or college degree, 6—master’s degree or higher.

  8. Blue collar occupations included farmers, fishermen, hunters, skilled and non-skilled workers such as craftsmen and loggers, service workers such as waiters, hairdressers, cooks, etc., as well as policemen, drivers, etc. White collar occupations included senior/junior professionals such as doctors, professors, teachers, editors, and administrators/executives such as government officials, village leaders, secretaries, etc.

  9. Household income represented the total household annual income—pooled net annual income of husband and wife in thousands of Chinese Yuan, as reported in Table 1.

  10. In order to save the space, province variables were not shown in the tables. They are available upon request.

  11. Husband’s age (hage) and wife’s age (wage) were also considered in the model to control for the independent effects of ages. For the concern of multicollinearity, only husband’s age was added in the model eventually.

  12. For husband’s education years and wife’s education years, the Pearson Correlation Coefficient was 0.69, with the significance at the 1 % level; for husband’s occupation and wife’s occupation, the χ 2 test statistic for non-correlation was 519.6349, indicating they were significantly interdependent at the 1 % level.

  13. The problem of quasi-completion occurs when an independent variable nearly perfectly predicts one of the outcome categories.

  14. The frequency results suggested 1,000 Chinese Yuan might have been an appreciate threshold for difference in income between the wife and the husband. For 69 % of the couples, the wife’s income was less than the husband’s income. The wife earned more than the husband, but the difference was less than 1,000 Chinese Yuan, for 13 % of couples. For 18 % of couples, the wife earned at least 1,000 Chinese Yuan more than the husband.

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  1. Department of Economics, Suffolk University, Boston, MA, USA

    Yi Zhang

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Zhang, Y. “Take My Mother-in-law…Please!”. J Fam Econ Iss 36, 633–645 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-014-9428-x

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