Table 7 presents estimates from specification (3). The coefficients of _Firstborn girl_ imply that FG families have more children and practice greater sex-selection at second and higher parities even if expected dowry is zero. The interaction coefficients are, however, highly insignificant for the fertility regressions implying that there is no significant differential effect of dowry by firstborn sex on future childbearing. For sex-selection, the interaction terms are also insignificant at conventional levels, but not as strongly as in the case of fertility. We obtain similar results from REDS data; see Table A.9.

These findings not only assuage concerns about endogenous fertility, but are also important in their own right. It is frequently claimed that dowry is an underlying cause of son preference, malebiased fertility, and discrimination against girls in India. Bhalotra et al. (2016), for instance, find that an unexpected one-time increase in the price of gold led to immediate rise in fetal and infant mortality of girls presumably because households perceived the gold price shock as an increase in the value of dowry. Similarly, Alfano (2015) finds that an amendment that made the Indian anti-dowry law stricter in 1985 led to decreases in male-biased fertility behaviors as it potentially made the dowry cost of daughters smaller. If dowry indeed causes male-biased behaviors, by the same reasoning, FG families should also be more likely to practice sex-selection at higher parities as expected dowry rises. However, we do not find strong evidence for this, with the caveat that our specification is quite different from those used in prior work. Our findings are consistent with Borker et al. (2017), who argue that dowry is not the root cause of sex-selection in India; instead, sexselection is driven by marriage-market frictions that arise from the way the institution of marriage is structured in India.

While the desire for at least one son is real, and affects childbearing decisions in India (Jayachandran (2017)), we find that it leads to higher fertility and higher sex ratios _even in the absence of dowry_ , but dowry does not seem to be an additional significant explanatory factor. This finding is reasonable for the following reason. If dowry expenditure was the predominant reason for sexselective behavior, one would expect parents to always prefer a son over a daughter, irrespective of birth parity and sex-composition of other children, since all daughters require a dowry. However, the pattern of son preference and sex-selection in India is highly parity-specific and depends on the number of sons a family has. Indian parents seem to strongly desire _one_ son, and conditional on having at least one son, stated preferences are quite gender neutral.<sup>36</sup> The bulk of sex-selective abortions take place in families that do not have a son.

# **5 How are savings financed?**

Next we test if FG families make adjustments to consumption expenditure, labor supply, and debt to finance the higher savings that we observe above.

**Consumption.** For per capita consumption expenditure, we estimate specification (2)—the co-

> 36The emphasis on having one son is likely due to the lack of institutional old-age support (Ebenstein and Leung (2010)) and cultural norms such as patrilocality (Ebenstein (2014)) and male-centered funeral rituals.

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