Child loss and maternal wages in China

ABSTRACT

Using data from a random sample of the 2005 National Population Survey of China, we investigate the association between child death and maternal hourly wages. Approximately 1.6 per cent of the population has experienced at least one child death. Such bereaved mothers’ hourly wages are 53 per cent lower than those of non-bereaved mothers. We find that child death carries a significant wage penalty. Son death has a larger impact than daughter death and its effect decreases as the number of children in the household increases. Our decomposition results show that number of children, maternal education and regional characteristics are the three most important contributors to the wage gap, yet unexplained differences remain large, especially at the lower end of the wage distribution.

KEYWORDS:

• Bereaved mothers
• hourly wage
• Heckman selection model
• decompositional analysis
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Peng Nie http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5322-6324