Title: Growth in a Patrilocal Economy: Female Schooling, Household Savings, and the One-Child Policy

National Chengchi University

Abstract: We develop a model of parental education decision to analyze how a population control policy affects the households' decisions on saving and schooling in a patrilocal society in which sons are responsible to support aged parents more than daughters. Parents' investment in education depends on the degree of parental altruism and also on the need for old-age security in the form of children's nancial transfers. A tightened population control policy makes parental altruism more important than the security motive and thereby shortens gender gap in education. Our model can explain the fact that under a series of population control policies China experiences a rapid growth of female education attainment. Meanwhile, our model does not explain the observed increase in the household saving rate very well from the perspective of demographic transition and this is mostly due to dissving from the expanding aging population.