by virtue of being more wanted, post-ultrasound daughters in firstborn-girl families receive higher parental investments than girls born pre-ultrasound, narrowing investment gaps in these families between sons and daughters, relative to children in firstborn-boy families. Similarly, parents who achieve their desired sex-mix of births using sex-selective abortion in the post-ultrasound period have no need to use son-biased fertility stopping.<sup>40</sup> A corollary of this is that actual fertility should move closer to desired fertility and we are able to test this as, unusually, we have individual data on desired fertility. Finally, we argue that if it is the availability of sex-selective abortion rather than something else that is driving our findings, then we should see an increase in birth spacing in the post-ultrasound period among families with firstborn girls relative to other families. We also investigate heterogeneity in treatment impacts by different indicators of SES with a view to further elucidating mechanisms.

# **6.1 Postnatal Health Investments**

We posited above that declining under-5 mortality among girls signals increased parental investments in them. We directly test for this in Table 4. The outcomes are the number of months a child is breastfed;<sup>41</sup> a dummy variable indicating that the child has received at least one vaccine; and medical expenditure (in rupees) on the child in the year prior to the survey.<sup>42</sup> Pre-ultrasound, in families with a firstborn girl, boys were breastfed for a longer duration and were more likely to be vaccinated and to receive expenditure during illness. The estimates show that the gender gaps in breastfeeding and vaccination significantly declined during the post-ultrasound period in firstborn-girl families, although in some cells we lose significance for breastfeeding coefficients. The coefficients for medical expenditure during sickness are also positive, but imprecise, and only significant in one specification. A previous literature estimates that breastfeeding differences explain about 9 percent of the gender gap in post-neonatal child mortality in India (Jayachandran and Kuziemko (2011)) and that sex differences in vaccinations explain between 20 - 30 percent (Oster (2009)). We estimate that the contributions of breastfeeding and vaccination to the ultrasound-led decline in EFM are, respectively, 19 percent and 7 to 10 percent (details in Online Appendix C).

For reasons discussed in Section 3, we also conducted this analysis using NFHS data. The NFHS contains information not only on immunization and breastfeeding, but also reports the number of antenatal checks during pregnancy. The results are broadly similar and are available in Table A.12.

Our strictest specifications identify gender gaps and do not directly deliver an estimate of

> 40 Of course, only a fraction of families with firstborn daughters do not want subsequent girls and only a fraction of those will commit abortion. The contention is that, after ultrasound becomes available, a larger fraction of those families that do have daughters want them.

> 41Breastfeeding results are based on the last two surviving births of a mother and are based on the sample of children above age two to take into account censoring issues.

> 42Medical expenditure is conditional upon illness and includes doctor’s fees, medicines, and costs of special diets during the illness. The specifications are similar to those for mortality except that we drop the urban indicator (since REDS covers only rural households) and the wealth quintiles (not reported in REDS), and, since we have a smaller sample, we drop _ρbt_ , _ξbGj_ , and _νsGj_ and replace _φst_ with state-specific linear time trends.

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