social insurance scheme on the SRB, Ebenstein and Leung (2013) use (a) multivariate regressions to see whether change in SRB before and after 1991 was associated with program availability in the village, and (b) complement this with an instrumental variable (IV) model that instrumented variation in the program’s availability using the share of the village’s population ages 40 or more. The data for this analysis came from the 2002 China Household Income Survey and the Chinese census. The evaluation results suggest that the SRB increased more in counties that had fewer villages participating in the program, and the increase in SRB was 9 percent less in counties that did adopt the program even after controlling for other village-level characteristics.

Ebenstein (2014) finds similar results for Korea and Armenia. For details on the Korean study, see Section 5. For Armenia, Ebenstein (2014) tests how the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the withdrawal of social protections provided under the USSR, affected the male fraction of births. Using data from the Armenian census, he employs a difference-in-difference approach to compare the male fraction of births had by high educated and low educated parents, before (1983-1991) and after the Soviet collapse (1992-2001). The idea behind this empirical strategy is that low educated parents would be particularly vulnerable with the sudden withdrawal of social protection, and they would therefore be more likely to sex select and revert to traditional forms of old-age insurance. The difference-in-difference estimate suggests that after the fall of the Soviet Union, the male fraction of births for low educated parents increased by 2.2 percent. These results do not necessarily imply a causal relation between the availability of social insurance and the tendency to sex select (more details in following paragraph). However, the timing of the increase in SRB, and the group that particularly contributed to that increase in SRB, hint at the plausibility of a causal relationship.

Caution must be used when interpreting the results outlined above. A causal relationship between social protection and SRB is not fully established in these studies – an issue acknowledged by the authors of these studies as well. In the China study, for example, the instrumental variable approach used may not appropriately account for factors that affect both the instrument for program availability (population age structure) and the SRB. In the Armenia study, (a) the assumption that the trends in the male fraction of births for high educated and low educated parents were parallel in the Soviet era is not tested, and (b) other possible causes for rising SRB among low educated parents are not fully ruled out. Overall, the main difficulty with identifying a causal impact in these cases comes from the non-random assignment (or withdrawal) of social protection.

# _Female political participation_

Measures to encourage political participation among women can be fruitful as well. With more female representation in the political sphere, girls’ aspirations and parents’ valuation of girls’ capabilities can change as female politicians can serve as role models.

Beamen et al. (2009) test this hypothesis using 1991 census data and 2006-2007 household survey data from the Birbhum district in the state of West Bengal, India. In 1993, it was legally required that one-third of village council positions in India be randomly reserved for women. Since the assignment of the reservations for women was random, Beamen et al. (2009) can use simple regression models to estimate the causal impact of female political presence on gender attitudes.

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