after age 30 (while among the educated an effect is visible also among younger women) (appendix figure A.3). This is consistent with poorer women selectively aborting a female fetus later in life, probably when the costs of having an additional daughter become unsustainable (i.e., dowry costs).<sup>40</sup> However, as the variable for terminated pregnancy does not distinguish among the reasons for termination (e.g., miscarriage, abortion, or stillbirth), it is important to consider this evidence as only indicative of higher recourse to induced abortion for sex selection.<sup>41</sup> Column (13) shows that women with first-born girls unconditionally have 0.301 more children ever born, 0.295 after including all the controls (both significant at 1% level). The latter estimate implies a 8.7 percent effect. As expected, the effect is statistically different for educated women for whom the effect of a first-born girl on fertility is attenuated. Appendix table A.1 additionally estimates the effect of the sex of the first two or three children on fertility outcomes of women who had at least two or three live births. Consistent with increasing pressure for giving birth to a male child, additional daughters after the first substantially increase the effects on all the examined outcomes.

Altogether, these results suggest that the sex of the first-born strongly affects women’s fertility behavior, and that educated women tend to rely more on sex-selective abortion, while uneducated women rely on son-preferring fertility behavior.

# **5.2.2 Birth spacing regressions**

The NFHS reports the entire fertility history of each woman. I exploit information on the length of the interval between successive births. The idea is to test whether women with a first-born girl try to conceive the following child sooner than women with a first-born boy.

In a first step, I estimate whether the spacing between first and second child is affected by the sex of the first child, as well as whether the interval between second and third child is affected by the sex of the second child (conditional on the first child being a girl). To do this, I use a regression similar to equation 1, in which the dependent variable is either the number of months or the probability of an interval shorter than 15 months. To evaluate the effect of the sex of the first-born, I first restrict the sample to women with at least two children ever born (who report at least one birth interval), and then to the sample of women with at least three children ever born for the of the sex of the second child.

The availability of birth histories allows a second empirical strategy that exploits the variation in the length of the interval and the sex of the child _within_ the reported history of each woman. This is done with mother fixed effects. However, this methodology does not allow the estimation

> 40It is also consistent with a higher probability of miscarriage for women engaging in son-preferring behavior.

> 41Only NFHS-II provides some more details on whether the abortion was spontaneous or induced. Evidence suggests that at least some of the abortions reported as spontaneous are instead induced (due to misreporting) (Arnold, Kishor and Roy, 2002).

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