Son Preference, Sex Selection and Gender Inequality in India

In the backdrop of the debate on missing women (Oster, 2005), this paper empirically tests for two competing explanations of the increasing sex ratio at birth (SRB) in India: prevalence of hepatitis B and human intervention in the form of sex selective abortion or female infanticide. Estimating a simple model of male-preferring stopping rule using the method of maximum likelihood with data from three rounds of the NFHS in India (1992, 1998 and 2005), I find that the probability of male birth varies significantly across birth parities. This provides evidence of human intervention. Using a dummy on scheduled tribes as a novel proxy for the prevalence of hepatitis B in India, I reestimate the model by endogenizing the probability of male birth. I find that hepatitis B has no impact on the probability of male birth for 1992 and a negative impact for 1998; this rules out hepatitis B as a possible explanation for the increasing SRB. I conclude that human intervention in the form of sex-selective abortion or female infanticide, rather than biological factors like hepatitis B, explains the increasing SRB in India. JEL Codes: J1, J7.