Three Papers on Marriage and Family in China.

[摘要] China is a country of rapid social change and tremendous contextual variations. This dissertation examines how those societal conditions have formed and framed Chinese people’s marriage and family behaviors. Specifically, Chapter 2 reports on a surprising inverted U-shaped trend in age homogamy from 1960 to 2005. One plausible explanation is that intensified economic pressure and rising consumerism during the post-1990s reform era have acted to increase women’s desire to marry men who are more economically established, and thus usually older. Chapter 3 examines how marital behaviors of a unique Chinese Muslim group – Hui – respond to varying conditions of local ethnic marriage markets. Results show that in places with higher Hui concentrations, Hui tend to have higher marriage rates, marry earlier and marry more endogamously. Conditional on being married, the logged odds of exogamy over endogamy is significantly lower in places with higher Hui concentrations; nevertheless, the negative relationship between Hui concentration and the logged odds of exogamy over singleness only holds for women. This indicates the competition between the norm of universal marriage and the norm of endogamy. Moreover, while men are more responsive to the change in Hui concentrations, women are more strictly constrained by the norm of universal marriage than men at all levels of Hui concentration. Men and women are equally restricted by the norm of endogamy. Chapter 4 examines the gender-specific fertility effects on parents’ time use, income and subjective well-being. Using gender of the first child as an instrumental variable based on the regional exemptions to the one-child policy in China, we aim to establish the causal estimates of the fertility effects. Results show that with more children, fathers spend significantly more time working and less time taking care of family members. Mothers, on the other hand, report better subjective well-being.This dissertation contributes toward understanding of the contextual influences, temporal or regional, on individuals’ marriage and family behaviors, under a research setting of transition and diversity. Future directions for this line of research point to the incorporation of theories which account for the setting-specific mechanisms regarding gender, marriage and family.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Economic Reform

[关键词] Marital Age Homogamy;Economic Reform;Muslim Chinese;Gender;Motherhood Penalty;Fatherhood Premium;Sociology;Social Sciences;Sociology