Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15818
Authors: Francisco Beltrán Tapia; Mikołaj Szotysek; Bartosz Ogrek; Siegfried Gruber
Abstract: The topic of “missing girls” in historical Europe has not only been mostly neglected, but previous research addressing this issue usually took the available information too lightly, either rejecting or accepting the claims that there was discrimination against female children, without assessing the possibility that the observed child sex ratios could be attributable to chance, mortality differentials, or registration quality. This article contributes to this discussion by (1) using a novel dataset of historical child sex ratios that covers a large part of the European geography between 1700 and 1950; and (2) explicitly considering the effects of random variability, demographic variation, and faulty enumeration in the analysis. Our results provide evidence that some of these European populations had child sex ratios well above the levels usually considered “natural”. Although part of this variation is indeed shown to be due to random noise and structural features related to infant mortality differentials and census quality, some of the observed sex ratios are too high to be attributed solely to these proximate factors. Thus, these findings suggest that there are behavioural explanations for some of the unbalanced sex ratios observed in our data.
Keywords: sex ratios; infant and child mortality; gender discrimination; health
JEL Codes: I14; I15; J13; J16; N33
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| random variability (C46) | observed child sex ratios (CSRs) (J13) |
| infant mortality rates (J13) | observed child sex ratios (CSRs) (J13) |
| census quality (C80) | observed child sex ratios (CSRs) (J13) |
| higher infant mortality rates (J13) | lower child sex ratios (CSRs) (J13) |
| rugged terrain (R14) | census quality (C80) |
| census quality (C80) | accuracy of sex ratio reporting (C83) |
| observed CSRs (after controlling for factors) (J79) | potential gender discrimination (J16) |