Earticle

초록

영어

A long-standing popular narrative in China—the “Little Emperor” hypothesis—holds that children raised without siblings under the One-Child Policy (OCP) are overfed and overindulged, placing them at elevated risk of adult obesity. This paper provides new causal evidence on the long-run physical-health consequences of only-child status induced by the policy. The analysis draws on pooled CHNS data for individuals born in or after 1979 and observed in early adulthood. To address the endogeneity of fertility decisions, I instrument only-child status with the interaction of provincial fine-to-income ratios and pre-outcome community-to-province income weights, exploiting geographic and temporal variation in OCP enforcement intensity. OLS estimates reproduce the conventional positive association: with family and community controls, only children exhibit higher BMI and are more likely to be overweight. Once endogeneity is addressed, however, the sign reverses: the IV estimates suggest lower adult BMI and overweight risk among compliers, with a similarly negative but less precisely estimated effect on clinical obesity. First-stage diagnostics slightly exceed the conventional weak-instrument threshold, and a specification test strongly rejects the null that OLS and IV estimates are equal, consistent with substantial upward selection bias in the naive association. This pattern is consistent with positive selection on community affluence biasing the OLS estimates upward. Under a local average treatment effect (LATE) interpretation, the resource-concentration channel appears to dominate the indulgence channel among compliers: parents induced into single-child households by stricter enforcement direct marginal resources toward nutritional balance rather than caloric surplus. The BMI and overweight findings survive a battery of robustness checks—alternative cutoffs, clustered inference, province fixed effects, sample expansion, and a placebo test—while the obesity estimates remain negative but less robust. Gender-stratified estimates, interpreted cautiously given weak first-stage instrument strength, suggest the negative effects on BMI and overweight may be more pronounced among women, consistent with differential parental investment and stronger thinness norms for daughters in contemporary China. Overall, the OCP's resource-concentration effect may have operated as a net protective factor against higher adult BMI and overweight risk among the policy's compliers.

목차

Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Institutional Background and Conceptual Framework
2.1 Institutional Background of the One-Child Policy
2.2 A Parental Health-Investment Framework
2.3 Competing Channels
2.4 Why OLS and IV Estimates May Differ
3. Data and Empirical Strategy
3.1 Data and Sample
3.2 Empirical Specification
4. Empirical Results
4.1 First-Stage Estimates
4.2 Main OLS and IV Estimates
4.3 Discussion of Magnitudes
4.4 Robustness Checks
4.5 Heterogeneity by Gender
5. Conclusion
References

키워드

저자

• Liu, Jingwen [ Department of Economics, Kyung Hee University, Korea ] Corresponding Author

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  Journal of China Studies

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1975-5902

• eISSN

  3022-5590

• 수록기간

  2006~2026

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 912 DDC 951