The One-Child Policy and Household Saving
Open accessAbstract
We investigate whether the “one-child policy” has contributed to the rise in China’s household saving rate and human capital in recent decades. In a life-cycle model with intergenerational transfers and human capital accumulation, fertility restrictions lower expected old-age support coming from children—inducing parents to raise saving and education investment in their offspring. Quantitatively, the policy can account for at least 30% of the rise in aggregate saving. Using the birth of twins under the policy as an empirical out-of-sample check to the theory, we find that quantitative estimates on saving and education decisions line up well with micro-data.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
A body of literature finds consistent evidence of a strong negative effect of fertility on savings.
“At the microeconomic level, a body of literature, much of it based on the quasi-experimental nature of the introduction and recent relaxation of China's one-child policy (Banerjee et al. 2014, Ge et al. 2018, Choukhmane et al. 2023), has emerged that finds consistent evidence of a strong negative effect of fertility on savings.”
From Fertility in High-Income Countries: Trends, Patterns, Determinants, and Consequences (2024) · cites this paper as Choukhmane et al. 2023
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 36
- Angrist, Joshua D., Lavy, Victor and Analia Schlosser. 2010. "Multiple experiments for the causal link between the quantity and quality of children." Journal of Labor Economics 28, 773-824.
- Barro, Robert and Jong-Wha Lee. 2010. "A New Data Set of Educational Attainment in the World, 1950-2010. " Journal of Development Economics 104(C), 184-198.
- Becker, Gary, S. and H. Gregg Lewis. 1973. "On the Interaction between the Quantity and Quality of Children." The Journal of Political Economy, 81, 279-288.
- Boldrin, Michele and Larry E. Jones. 2002. "Mortality, Fertility, and Saving in a Malthusian Economy." Review of Economic Dynamics 5, 775-814.
- Browning, Martin. 1992. "Children and Household Economic Behavior." Journal of Economic Literature 30 (3), 1434-1475.
- Cai, Yong. 2010. "China's Below-Replacement Fertility: Government Policy or Socioeconomic Development?." Population and Development Review 36 (3), 419-440.
- Carroll, Christopher D. and David N. Weil. 1994. "Saving and growth: A Reinterpretation," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy.
- Chamon, Marcos and Eswar Prasad. 2010. "Why Are Saving Rates of Urban Households in China Rising?." American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 2(1), 93-130.
- Chesher, Andrew. 1998. "Individual Demands from Household Aggregates: Time and Age Vari- ation in the Composition of Diet." Journal of Applied Econometrics 13 (5), 505-524.
- Cisno, Alessandro and Furio Rosati. 1996. "Jointly determined saving and fertility behavior: theory and estimates for Germany, Italy, UK, and USA." European Economic Review 40, 1561- 1589.
- Coeurdacier, Nicolas, Stephane Guibaud and Keyu Jin. 2015. "Credit Constraints and Growth in a Global Economy." American Economic Review 105 (9), 2838-2881.
- Coeurdacier, Nicolas, Stephane Guibaud and Keyu Jin. 2014. "Fertility Policies and Social Se- curity Reforms in China." IMF Economic Review 62(3), 371-408.
- Curtis, Chadwick C., Steven Lugauer and Nelson C. Mark. 2015. "Demographic Patterns and Household Saving in China." American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics 7(2), 58-94.
- Du, Qingyuan and Shang-Jin Wei. 2013. "A Theory of the Competitive Saving Motive." Journal of International Economics 91 (2), 275-289.
- Gourieroux, Christian S., Alain Monfort and Alain Trognon. 1984. "Pseudo Maximum Like hood Methods: Applications to Poisson Models." Econometrica 52 (3), 701-720.
- Horioka, Charles Y. and Junmin Wan. 2007. "The Determinants of Household Saving in China: A Dynamic Panel Analysis of Provincial Data." Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 39, 2077- 2096.
- Huang, Wei, Xiaoyan Lei and Yaohui Zhao, 2016. "One-Child Policy and the Rise of Man-Made Twins." The Review of Economics and Statistics 2016 98:3, 467-476.
- Imrohoroglu, Ayse and Kai Zhao, 2018. "The Chinese Saving Rate: Long-Term Care Risks, Family Insurance, and Demographics." Journal of Monetary Economics, forthcoming.
- Jones, Larry E., Alice Schoonbroodt and Michele Tertilt, 2010. "Fertility Theories: Can they explain the Negative Fertility-Income Relationship?.", Demography and the Economy, 43-100, edited by John Shoven, University of Chicago Press.
- Jones, Larry E. and Michele Tertilt, 2008. "An Economic History of Fertility in the U.S.: 1826- 1960." Frontiers of Family Economics, Vol. 1 edited by Peter Rupert, Emerald Press,
- Mankiw, N. Gregory, David Romer and David N. Weil. 1992. "A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth", Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107, 407-437.
- Manuelli Rodolfo E. and Ananth Seshadri. 2007. "Explaining International Fertility Differences." Quarterly Journal of Economics 124(2): 771-807.
- Modigliani, Franco. 1986."Life-cycle, individual thrift, and the wealth of nations'.' American Economic Review 76(3), 297-313.
- Modigliani, Franco and Shi Larry Cao. 2004. "The Chinese Saving Puzzle and the Life-Cycle Hypothesis." Journal of Economic Literature 42, 145-170.
- Newman, John L. 1983. "Economic Analyses of the Spacing of Births." American Economic Review 73 (2), 33-37.
- Li, Haizheng, Yunling Liang, Barbara Fraumeni, Zhiqiang Liu and Xiaojung Wang. 2013. " Human Capital in China, 1985-2008." Review of Income and Wealth 59(2), 212-234.
- Oliveira, Jacqueline. 2016. "The Value of Children: Intergenerational Transfers, Fertility, and Human Capital." Journal of Development Economics 120, 1-16.
- Rosenzweig, Mark R. and Kenneth I. Wolpin. 2000."Natural "Natural Experiments" in Eco- nomics." Journal of Economic Literature 38 (4), 827-874.
- Rosenzweig, Mark R. and Jusen Zhang. 2009."Do population control policies induce more human capital investment? Twins, birthweight and China's 'one-child' policy" The Review of Economic Studies 76, 1149-1174.
- Santos Silva, João and Silvana Tenreyro. 2006. "The Log of Gravity." The Review of Economics and Statistics 8, 641-658.
- Scharping, Thomas. 2003. "Birth Control in China 1949-2000: Population Policy and Demo- graphic Development." Routledge Curzon, London and New York.
- Sianesi, Barbara and John van Reenen. 2003. "The Returns to Education: Macroeconomics. " Journal of Economic Surveys 17(2), 157-200.
- Song, Zheng, Storesletten, Kjetil and Fabrizio Zilibotti. 2011. "Growing like China." American Economic Review, 101(1), 202-241.
- Song, Zheng, Storesletten, Kjetil, Wang, Yikai and Fabrizio Zilibotti. 2015. "Sharing High Growth across Generations: Pensions and Demographic Transition in China." American Eco- nomic Journal: Macroeconomics, 7(2), 1-39.
- Wang, Xin and Yi Wen. 2012. "Housing Prices and the High Chinese Saving Rate Puzzle." China Economic Review, 23(2), 265-283.
- Wei, Shang-Jin and Xiaobo Zhang. 2011. "The Competitive Saving Motive: Evidence from Rising Sex Ratios and saving Rates in China." Journal of Political Economy, 119 (3), 511-564.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Fertility in High-Income Countries: Trends, Patterns, Determinants, and Consequences
Bloom, D. E., Kuhn, M., & Prettner, K. (2024) · Annual Review of Economics · doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-081523-013750 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
Fertility in High-Income Countries: Trends, Patterns, Determinants, and Consequences
Bloom, D. E., Kuhn, M., & Prettner, K. (2023) · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4597716 · Cited by 9 · see citing works
- Authors
- Choukhmane, T., Coeurdacier, N., & Jin, K.
- Affiliations
- National Bureau of Economic Research (US)
- Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (FR)
- London School of Economics and Political Science (GB)
- Venue
- Journal of the European Economic Association
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2023-01-09
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 987-1032
- ISSN
- 1542-4766 (ISSN-L)
- 1542-4774
- OpenAlex
- W4313856762
- Cited by
- 63
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 15 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 1 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 1 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 23.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of the European Economic Association (publishedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- London School of Economics and Political Science Research Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) (submittedVersion)
- London School of Economics and Political Science Theses Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) (submittedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- European Research Council (336748)
- SciencesPo-LSE Mobility Scheme
- CEPR
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences
- Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Accounting › Financial Literacy, Pension, Retirement Analysis
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics
- Keywords
- one-child policy, household savings, human capital accumulation, intergenerational transfers, life-cycle model, old-age support, education investment, twins, China
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
