The three essays in this dissertation study son preference and its influence on parental fertility behavior and marital stability in China during modernization.

The first essay examines changes in the degree of son preference and its major determinants in China. We combine the "stated" and "revealed" preference approaches to study the multidimensional nature of son preference. We find that the stated son preference declines over time, yet a mixed pattern appears in the revealed son preference. The sex ratio at birth soars in 2000. Yet, the gender gaps in feeding practices, child survival and education decline. Finally, we argue that the presence of village-owned enterprise may reduce parental son preference in rural China.

Son preference has profoundly affected parental fertility behaviors. The second essay investigates four competing channels generating the skewed sex ratio at birth in China. We find that sex-selective abortion accounts for more than 85% of 13 million "missing" daughters since the implementation of the One-Child policy, facilitated by the diffusion of ultrasound-B and the spread of prenatal checking. Under-reporting of female births may contribute from 6.73% to 15% of the reported distorted sex ratio at birth. We further demonstrate that other channels such as infanticide and hepatitis B are unlikely to be important determinants for this phenomenon. Moreover, couples are more likely to use ultrasound-B to manipulate the sex of their first births if they live in areas with strict One-Child policy.

The third essay examines the consequence of son preference on marital stability during three recent decades in China. We find that, in general, the firstborn being a girl itself weakly predicts parental divorce. But, for parents living in areas with a strict One-Child policy, it increases the probability of divorce by around 0.07 percentage points in 1990. Second, the effects of the gender of the first child on divorce vary with family size. Finally, our results show that girls are around 8 percentage points less likely to be in their fathers' custody than boys after parental divorce.