Speaker: Prof. Xin Meng, Australian National University

Time: 14:00-16:00 p.m., May 16, 2023

Venue: Wiley (Scan the QR code to participate)


Abstract:

How does fertility decline affect the gender gap in literacy/numeracy continues to be an important empirical question in the literature of labour economics? Prof. Xin Meng and her colleagues examine the relationship between fertility decline and the gender gap in literacy/numeracy measured by using test scores. Drawing on Becker's Quantity-Quality (Q-Q) trade-off model, they propose that the Q-Q trade-off would be larger for daughters than that for sons, in a society such as China where son-preference is prevalent. A further analysis on the underlying channels shows that a reduction in fertility would more likely to make girls live in a single-sex family, which in turn increases the share of human capital investment for girls. In this public lecture, Prof. Meng will share their research findings.

Biography:

Prof. Xin Meng currently works at the Research School of Economics, College of Business and Economics, Australian National University. She is also a Fellow of Australian Academy of Social Sciences. Her main research interest lies in China’s labour market, poverty, income inequality, human capital development, the economic implications of rural-urban migration, and the influence of institutions and culture on human behavior and on gender discrimination. Prof. Meng has published papers in many top journals such as Science, Review of Economic Studies, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Labour Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Public Economics. Her book Labour Market Reform in China was published by Cambridge University Press in 2000. In addition, she is a regular contributor to the annual conference, China-Update, organized at the Australian National University. In the past decade she spent a large amount of her research effort on the project of Rural-Urban Migration in China, which has collected nine waves of data on rural-urban migrants throughout China for the period 2008-2016.

Source: School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences