Labor Market Conditions and Cultural Change: Evidence from Vietnam

Abstract

This paper relates strategic parental fertility behavior and early childhood human capital investments to prospective labor market opportunities in Vietnam. Suitability of land for plough adoption is shown to influence both traditional post-marital residence rules and contemporary under-5 sex ratios. A quasi-natural experiment identifies causal impacts of the sex of a woman's first-born child on fertility and under-5 mortality, across household types with historically different relative productivity of the sexes in agriculture. Impacts vary across household type for rural but not for second-generation urban women. Cultural heterogeneity attributable to relative productivity in pre-industrial societies is strongly mitigated by rural-urban migration.

Keywords: technology, geology, culture, migration, second generation, labor markets, natural experiment, Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), Vietnam, Public-Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)

JEL Classification: J1, O1