marital attainment by the assumed sex ratio of births that are occurring today only begin to appear mid-century. As a result, aggregate spousal availability will hit an all-time low before recovering, regardless of the fertility and sex ratio scenarios considered. The implications of these patterns in the 21<sup>st</sup> century are discussed further in the next section.

In the China 1990 and 2000 Census cross-section, prefectures with the highest sex ratios had 5-10 percentage points more males and females in the unmarried state at age 25.<sup>9</sup> The observation that men have worse marital prospects in areas with higher sex ratios has an ambiguous interpretation. It may be that men and women marry in the prefecture in which they are born, and so areas with higher sex ratios will consequently have lower marriage rates for men. A second explanation that is fully consistent with the figure is the exact opposite conclusion: if people in China are willing to migrate for marriage, it will be that women will outmigrate from poorer areas and migrate into wealthier areas. This implies that the areas of China where we will observe unmarried men are not the areas with high sex ratios at birth. Rather, the average status of men will be the more critical predictor of where problems will emerge. We present evidence in favor of this second explanation in Figure 2 **.** In Figure 2a, we map the net migration of women by prefecture for the purpose of marriage in absolute terms.<sup>10</sup> The areas shaded darker are experiencing inflows of women, and these areas overlap substantially with areas with a higher proportion of educated males (Figure 2b). The regressions shown in Table 2 demonstrate that prefectures with more-highly-educated males experience in-migration of females for marriage. In this table, we examine the relationship between variation in prefecture characteristics and the number of women who have migrated into the prefecture for the purpose of marriage (as a share of the total number of women). The results indicate that each year of additional average education among men is associated with an additional 0.196% of women who have relocated to the prefecture for the express purpose of marriage. The magnitude of this result is modest, but the implication is that even within a province, wealthier prefectures are able to attract women and mitigate problems associated with a skewed sex ratio at birth. In columns 2 and 3, we add control variables for the share of the prefecture with urban registration and the sex ratio of children aged 0-4. The results indicate that more urbanized prefectures attract females, possibly since urbanization reflects status and wealth in the area. Areas where sex ratios among young children are more skewed are also attracting females, highlighting a key pattern in China. Areas with skewed sex ratios are often wealthier than other parts of the country, and are able to mitigate their marriage market sex ratio by attracting women from outside the prefecture. If one considers sex-selective abortion a form of injustice which leads to problems for the next generation, then one also recognizes that there is a certain injustice to the location-specific burden of the unmarried men. As an analogy, it would be considered unfair if one country were to create large amounts of environmental pollution but ship the problem to poorer neighboring countries. In essence, this is what we observe in China’s marriage markets.

> 9 Authors calculations from the China 1990 and China 2000 Census. Prefectures were divided into quintiles based on the ratio of males 22-32 to females 20-30, The share of males and females by marital status by age for each crosssection was compared across the highest and lowest quintiles. High sex ratio areas showed earlier marriage for females (~5 percentage points more females married among 25 year olds) or later marriage for males (~10 percentage points more males unmarried among 25 year olds).

> 10 See appendix for counts and ranks by province.

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