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Quantity-quality trade-off in Northeast China during the Qing dynasty

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Abstract

We paint a detailed picture of whether the trade-off between human capital and fertility decisions was shaped in a pre-industrial society during the Qing dynasty. Using data from the China Multi-Generational Panel Dataset-Liaoning (CMGPD-LN), we investigate 16,328 adult males born between 1760 and 1880 in Northeast China. We control for birth-order effects and for a rich set of individual-, parental-, household-, and village-level characteristics in regression analyses on individuals from different household categories (elite vs. non-elite households). Our findings suggest that sibship size, as instrumented by twins at last birth, starts to have a substantial negative effect on the probability of receiving an education, indicating the emergence of a child quantity-quality trade-off for large parts of the population belonging to the Eight Banner System in Liaoning around the mid-Qing dynasty. Our results provide supportive evidence for the unified growth theory, showing that the decreased fertility rates in pre-transition China could be a result of rational behaviors perpetuated by households in response to higher educational returns and accessibility.

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Data Availability

The CMGPD-LN data that support the findings of this study are available in ICPSR with the identifier https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR27063.v10. Other materials are available at Mendeley Data, V4, doi:https://doi.org/10.17632/wvsy8mwk5t.1.

Notes

  1. Other explanations, such as those postulated by Cervellati and Sunde (2005), focused on a unified growth model where human capital is crucial due to its association with life expectancy but not due to its link to fertility. Strulik and Weisdorf (2008) also advanced a unified growth model that does not rely on human capital accumulation as the driving force behind the demographic changes.

  2. The notion of the child quantity-quality trade-off found its first uses in Becker (1960) and Becker and Lewis (1973), who argued that the elasticity of child quantity relating to income is smaller when compared to the elasticity of child quality with regard to income, implying that emphasis shifts towards child quality with rising income. However, the evidence is not consistent with its predictions (see Galor 2012).

  3. Based on the UGT, the interaction between the rate of technological progress and the size and composition of the population is affected by variations in biogeographical, institutional, and cultural factors as measured across countries or regions. These factors are part of what stimulated parents to invest in education, without decreasing their budget constraints related to raising children (as China did not experience any significant technological progress before the twentieth century).

  4. These studies suggested that Chinese families, influenced by the unintended consequence of their children competing for limited household resources, engaged in postnatal abortion (i.e., infanticide) and other contraceptive methods to control their fertility rates (Lee and Campbell 1997; Lee and Wang 1999). However, Cao and Chen (2002) and Cao and Chen (2003) pointed out that infanticide due to budget constraints cannot fully explain the dramatic decrease in male children during this period, since the Chinese preference for male offspring led to male infanticide being comparatively minimal.

  5. This strand of literature mostly exploits China’s family planning policy and the one-child policy as natural experiments. Wang et al. (2017) systematically examined the labor market outcomes of China’s family planning policies, which limited the number of children. Liang and Gibson (2018) found an adverse effect of siblings on human capital accumulations and discovered a stronger negative influence on girls than on boys, which reveals so-called boy preference in Chinese society (Li et al. 2011; Zhang 2017).

  6. There was no restriction of movement at the beginning of the Qing dynasty (1664–1667), in order to recruit the labor force needed for agriculture, but this did not last long.

  7. The government institutionalized the land lease to better balance the relationship between Manchu and Han immigrants in the Northeast. Thus, a long-term relationship of trust between the Manchu and Han could be established.

  8. As documented by the Chinese Ancient Academy System, “apart from several historically influential ones, most Shuyuan were shut down because the government could not provide enough funds for their functioning.”

  9. The list of large Shuyuan and their years of establishment is reported in Appendix Fig. A.1.

  10. The accessibility of formal training reduced the costs of education for non-elite households in two aspects. First, the tuition fees for private schools were decided by supply and demand (i.e., fewer Sishu, higher fees). Second, if a child from a non-elite family wanted to attend public school, where one’s socioeconomic status mattered in the admission process, his father would have had to purchase a title to fit the requirements.

  11. The dataset is used in various studies such as Campbell and Lee (2009) and Chen et al. (2014).

  12. It should be noted that we do not explore the new immigrants, but the descendants of immigrants (at least their second-generation descendants). Therefore, they were not affected by any experience in Central Plains.

  13. If the year when a child was born was not a year in which data for the household register was collected, we use the register data from when the child was 1 or 2 years old instead.

  14. The decline in fertility rates took place around 100 years before the transition occurred in Europe (Guinnane et al. 1994), which is in line with the literature on the occurrence of pre-transition birth restrictions (Cinnirella et al. 2017). One may argue whether the decrease in fertility rates is possibly due to individuals born in the latter period being less likely to be linked to their households. Appendix Fig. A.3 plots the distribution of observations that can be linked to the household and the father and the distribution of the total male population by birth cohort, showing that the distribution does not significantly change after the selection. The results investigating other socio-demographic changes, such as the trend in mortality or marriage rates, are reported in Fig. A.4.

  15. Using other years between 1760 and 1780 as the lower birth year bound does not alter our conclusions. The year 1880 was chosen as the upper birth year bound because, following the spread of Western studies along with the development of the Western Affairs Movement in the 1890s, the civil examination system was heavily criticized by the bourgeois reformers, with the system being formally abolished in 1904 (Bai 2019; Bai and Jia 2016).

  16. As the CMGPD-LN User Guide states, “since many daughters were never registered, some variables in the dataset undoubtedly underestimate the actual number of daughters. The average sex ratio of the age group 1–5 was 699:100.” Therefore, we exclude females. Then we set the restriction to adult men to avoid detecting an artificial negative correlation between sibship size and individual education driven by the higher early mortality risks of those individuals with more siblings.

  17. The lack of an observable child quality-quantity trade-off among these two subpopulations is discussed in detail in Section 4.3.

  18. The spatial distribution of the included villages and their four clusters are mapped in Appendix Fig. A.2.

  19. As our background section suggests, there were several levels of the civil exam. However, the CMGPD-LN dataset does not contain information on the levels of title attained by each individual, and we are thus unable to use different exam levels. The measures of human capital used in this strand of literature usually include school enrollment rates (Becker et al. 2010), school attendance (Fernihough 2017), or literacy, as measured by one’s signature (Klemp and Weisdorf 2019; Murphy 2015) or basic writing or reading skills (Murphy 2015). However, as the definition of being educated is relatively strict in the CMGPD-LN database, this would lower its mean when compared to the literature focusing on Western countries; those who were designated as being “educated” possessed much higher-level skills, such as skills related to comprehension and memory, or the ability to compose poetry on given subjects using specific poetic forms and calligraphy.

  20. We take the maximum number of brothers each individual has ever had regardless of their current status.

  21. However, the female siblings are included in Section 4.2 where we test the robustness of our results.

  22. The birth order is calculated based on all siblings, independent of gender. The results do not change when the birth order is calculated only based on male siblings (see Appendix Table A.3).

  23. When using the values that do not count any females, the results do not alter; this is reported in Table A.3.

  24. Although the linear approximation may be inconsistent due to the probabilities close to zero or one, we still employ linear regressions to facilitate the interpretation of our results. All the results remain robust regardless of the specifications chosen.

  25. The means of sibship size for elite and non-elite groups are 1.90 and 1.79, respectively; therefore, the difference between the coefficients in columns (5) and (6) is not driven by elite-group individuals having fewer brothers.

  26. In our selected sample, the gender ratio of male siblings is 500:100, slightly lower than the one indicated in the User Guide of the dataset. The total number of female observations was 5,729. The number of baseline individuals with data on female siblings was 3,879, and the average number of sisters per individual was 0.351. The elites were more likely to include data on their female household members, with the average number of sisters being 0.970 for individuals from elite households and 0.249 for non-elite households.

  27. The coefficients estimated when we use different sets of covariates, particularly those without household-related covariates whose generation process has been changed in 1789, are reported in columns (1)–(4) of Table A.6. All those results suggest the non-existence of a negative quantity-quality relationship among those earlier-born cohorts.

  28. We show the kernel density distribution before and after matching in Appendix Fig. A.7.

  29. The names and locations of these academies are reported in Appendix Fig. A.1 .

  30. The name of each village is not publicly available, thus we can only match individuals to the map by using their county of residence.

  31. This hypothesis is supported by Doepke (2004), who modeled how child-labor regulations that affected the opportunity cost of education accounted for cross-country variations in fertility decline.

  32. In our sample, 83% of the households were pure farming households.

  33. Dan was a unit of measure for the grain of approximately 50 kg.

  34. The use of twins as an instrument for estimating sibship size was first pioneered by Rosenzweig and Wolpin (1980a), and was later adopted by Bronars and Grogger (1994) and Angrist and Evans (1998), who used twin births as an instrumental variable for both male and female twins. Twin births have also been previously investigated in attempts to empirically support the quantity-quality model that predicts a negative impact of sibship size on a child’s present-day outcomes (Angrist et al. 2010; Cáceres-Delpiano 2006; Rosenzweig and Wolpin 1980b).

  35. We also exclude households with multiple twin births.

  36. We use the information on individuals born between 1810 and 1890 in the CMGPD-SC dataset. In Jilin, educational development happened even later than in Liaoning. The first Shuyuan was established in 1814, and the following two were established between Daoguang and Tongzhi Emperors’ reigns (1821–1875). Another ten Shuyuan have been established since 1875. Therefore, the birth years of the selected sample also correspond to the period of educational popularization, with a slightly smaller ratio of educated individuals than that in the baseline analysis.

  37. We believe that further studies on other economies within and outside of China are required to determine whether these findings can be generalized; for example, future works could provide more evidence about the UGT’s applicability to other Asian countries such as Japan, which had experienced an industrial revolution.

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Acknowledgements

We truly thank the editors Oded Galor and Madeline Zavodny, as well as four anonymous referees for their valuable and constructive comments, which substantially improved the paper. We are also grateful to the guidance of Jacob Weisdorf, and to the outreach support from the Institute for the History and Society of Northeast China at the School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiaotong University, and the 4th summer China Multigenerational Panel Data workshop held by them. Furthermore, we gratefully acknowledge the comments of Francesca Barigozzi, Gregory Clark, Cameron Campbell, Hao Dong, Margherita Fort, James Z. Lee, Xinyan Liu, Chicheng Ma, Yukichi Mano, Antonio Minniti, Chiaki Moriguchi, Carlos Santiago-Caballero, Yu Sasaki, Mari Tanaka, Ryuichi Tanaka, Meradee Tangvatcharapong, David Y. Wang, Wenshan Yang, and of all other participants in the 5th International Symposium on Quantitative History and in the seminars at Nanjing Audit University and Hitotsubashi University.

Funding

Yu Bai received support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS): [Grant Number 20H05629].

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Yu Bai conceived of the presented idea, contributed to the design and implementation of the research, and particularly to the writing of the original draft. Yanjun Li developed the theory and worked on data cleaning, contributed to the analysis of the results, and to the reviewing and editing of the manuscript. She was involved in planning and supervising the work. Pak-hung Lam contributed to the interpretation of the results, and particularly to the reviewing and editing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Yanjun Li.

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Bai, Y., Li, Y. & Lam, P.H. Quantity-quality trade-off in Northeast China during the Qing dynasty. J Popul Econ 36, 1657–1694 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-022-00933-x

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