However, to affect the findings, recall bias would have to be systematically gender-biased and specific to first-births. In societies with strong son preference women might deliberately underreport female births (even though there is no reason they should misreport those that occurred at first birth only).<sup>46</sup> If this is the case, age at first birth should be negatively associated with a first female birth. This is because women who do not report their first-born daughters and instead report a later born boy will appear as if they had a first-born boy, but later. I test for this possibility by estimating a probit model for the probability of a female at first birth regressed on age at first birth and other controls. Results instead indicate that age at first birth _positively_ and significantly predicts a first female birth (marginal effect of 0.001, with a standard error of 0.000, equally for all women and those aged 30 and older separately).<sup>47</sup> This result is not consistent with gender-biased recall bias but instead supports selective mortality.

As a further check, it is useful to note that gender-biased recall bias (arguably motivated by strong preferences for male children), if it exists, should not be decreasing over time in line with nondecreasing son preference in India (if anything, Census data report _increasing_ male-biased sexratios at birth). Since both selective mortality and gender-biased recall bias imply that women with a first-born girl appear younger on average (older women might have died or be more likely to under-report a first-born girl, respectively), I check the age distribution of women with a first-born girl across the three NFHS rounds. Specifically, I regress women’s age at the time of the survey on the variable ‘first-born girl’ and its interaction with the survey round dummies. The dependent variable is expressed in terms of seven age groups (in this case the regression is an ordered logit model), or as age in years (estimated with a linear model). As can be seen in column (1) table 12, women with a first-born girl are on average younger than those with a first-born boy in the first wave of the NFHS and this effect is attenuated for women in the last two survey rounds. Column (2) shows a similar pattern, although it is not significant. This pattern is not consistent with sex-selective recall bias but instead with the reduction in maternal mortality that has been taking place over the last decades in India.

# **6.3 Selective mortality or selective abortion?**

One could argue that figure 5 can be interpreted as evidence of selective abortion of female children (at first pregnancy) among older and uneducated women. However, as discussed in the previous sections, there is vast evidence in the literature that sex selection is instead common at higher-

> 46Gender-biased recall bias is not compatible with the state-wise patterns presented in section 4.1. If women do not want to report a first female birth because of son preference, then the decreasing share of women with a first-born girl as a function of women’s age should also be found in states with the highest sex ratios, i.e. Punjab and Haryana.

> 47Covariates include state fixed effects, urban dummy, birth year fixed effects, 7 five-year age groups dummies, survey round fixed effects, whether she and her partner have completed one or more years of education, a durables index, religion and caste. Result available upon request.

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