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Guilhem Cassan, Jean Marie Baland, François Woitrin (Université de Namur)
Stopping Rule and Sex Selective Abortion: New Measures and World Evidence
When parents want a specific number of children of a given gender (boys, in general), they can use two methods: the "stopping rule" and sex selective abortion. In societies in which gender preferences are prevalent, these methods can heavily affect fertility practices. We propose two novel theory-based measures of detection of these practices. Taking the perspective of the child rather than that of the family, these measures are easily implementable, precise, and rely on fewer assumptions than other measures in use. We first show that, under the stopping rule, girls are, on average, exposed to a larger number of younger siblings than boys. We then propose a new method to detect the prevalence of the stopping rule in a given society, and identify countries in which the stopping rule prevails, some of which have been largely ignored in the literature. Second, we show that sex selective abortion leads to boys having on average more elder sisters than girls. We then propose a new method to detect the prevalence of sex selective abortion in a given society.