of females among first births in India over time, despite changes in the availability of prenatal sexselection technology. Moreover, we do not find significant differences between FB and FG families in terms of socioeconomic characteristics such as expected dowry, caste, religion, father’s years of schooling, except for small differences in mother’s schooling and being SC (Table 2).<sup>29</sup>

**FG families have more girls.** Moreover, Indian parents are more likely to practice sexselective abortions after a firstborn girl (Almond and Edlund (2008), Abrevaya (2009), Bhalotra and Cochrane (2010), Anukriti et al. (2016)) and follow son-biased stopping rules, resulting in more girls on average in FG relative to FB households. In our data, the average number of girls in FG families is 1.694 as compared to 0.613 girls in FB families. The opposite is true for the average number of boys which is lower in FG families (=0.906) than in FB families (=1.671).

**Dowry expense is higher in FG families.** This suggests that FG families may face higher total anticipated dowry expense than FB families. However, this may not be the case if parents with more daughters pay sufficiently lower dowry per daughter than families with fewer daughters, or if FG families compensate by having more sons that bring dowry. Our data allow us to test this. Table A.5 shows that the total dowry paid (across all daughters) is higher when a household has more married daughters, and there is no significant effect of the number of daughters on dowry paid per daughter. This is reasonable as a substantially lower dowry offer comes with the risk of not being able to find a suitable groom for the daughter—a highly undesirable outcome for Indian parents. Moreover, as the _net_ number of daughters—defined as the difference between the number of daughters and the number of sons—increases, there is a significant increase in the difference between dowries paid for daughters and dowries received for sons. Thus, firstborn gender can be considered a quasi-random dowry shock to the household.

However, simply comparing FG and FB families is also not sufficient. Differential returns from (or costs of) a firstborn-son versus a firstborn-daughter may be due to factors other than dowry, such as higher male productivity in agriculture. FG parents may also save more relative to FB parents to support themselves during old age, as the custom of patrilocality implies that daughters (and not sons) move out of the natal home upon marriage. To explicitly take into account the contribution of dowry expectations to savings, we, therefore, interact the FG dummy with the expected dowry variable. This allows us to control for the main effect of FG, that will capture any changes in per capita saving due to firstborn sex that could result from factors unrelated to dowry; for instance, higher fertility among FG families due to the desire for at least one son.

Ideally, we would like to use data on household savings before the birth of the first child and

> 29Anukriti et al. (2016) show that there was no significant change in the sex-composition of first births for any of the socioeconomic groups after ultrasound technology became available. Although the vast majority of Indian families want to have a son if they can only have one child, at a family size of two they prefer having one daughter and one son over having two sons (Jayachandran (2017)). As desired and actual fertility in India are well above one, it is reasonable to assume that parents are not averse to having one girl, despite a strong desire for at least one boy. A formal test of orthogonality, where we regress expected dowry on the FG dummy and several other controls, yields an insignificant and extremely small coefficient on the FG indicator (p-value = 0.39).

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