Wang & Wang

4 Responses to Wang & Wang

1. Fei Mao says:

   January 10, 2014 at 8:05 am

   Hi Qinchi and Haixia,

   People’s reproductive behavior and fertility desire are interesting topics especially in the most populous countries. Some findings in your paper have shed light on the relationship between Chinese people’s reproductive behavior and their happiness. But I have a few questions on the research design:

   1. What is the age distribution of the people in the sample? Age should be considered as the most important factor which affects people’s reproductive behavior. I cannot see any detailed description of the data use and sample selection. I wonder whether age was taken into account in this study.

   2. I have a question on the research design regarding China’s “one-child policy”. As we all know that the government implemented the “one-child policy” in the late 1970s. Based on the introduction of this paper, the survey was conducted in 106 cities in China. However, the research is on people’s reproductive behavior rather than people’s fertility desire. The “One-child policy” was strict in urban cities in the past several decades even in these years. I was confused that why there are so many urban people have more than one child in your study. Was the survey conducted before the implementation of the policy?

   The comments above are simply based on the information which was mentioned in the short paper. The topic is really interesting, but the detailed information on the data use and research design is quite limited. Is there a detailed version paper on this topic?

   Thanks!
   • Zhengwei Ren says:

     January 10, 2014 at 12:00 pm

     Hi Fei,
     To your Question 2:
     Many people living in urban areas are rural migrants. They have rural Hukou, so they can have more than one child.
     • Fei Mao says:

       January 10, 2014 at 6:17 pm

       Hi Zhengwei,

       Thanks for your kind reply. Migration is really an important factor which should be considered in family study in contemporary China.

       Fei
2. Kathryn Yount says:

   January 12, 2014 at 7:30 pm

   This is an interesting topic with potential to understand the influence of sex composition of children on parental happiness. I recommend that the authors generate marginal effects from their models so that direct comparisons can be made between sex composition of children and happiness levels. also, there appeared to be differences by gender of the parent in the effects of sex composition of children an happiness – differences in this impact by gender of parent is potentially important. finally, what implications does sex selective abortion have, if any, for the findings of this analysis? It seems like the non-randomness of sex composition by birth order is problematic and needs to be taken into account.