**Table 7:** Length of the birth interval (# months), conditional on the gender of earlier-born children

||frstG|frstB|G,G|B,B|mixed|G,G,G|B,B,B|two boys<br>one girl|two girls<br>one boy|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Women with:|3+ ch|ildren||4+ children|||5+ ch|ildren||
||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|(5)|(6)|(7)|(8)|(9)|
|girl|-0.171|-0.039|-1.316**|0.437|0.167|-3.252***|1.015|0.267|-0.391|
||(0.427)|(0.380)|(0.616)|(0.568)|(0.364)|(0.980)|(0.904)|(0.425)|(0.438)|
|girl*dead child|0.550|0.531|1.198|-1.612|1.036|2.120|-1.919|0.675|0.840|
||(0.689)|(0.733)|(1.034)|(1.001)|(0.716)|(1.568)|(1.557)|(0.861)|(0.824)|
|dead child|-4.993***|-4.849***|-5.650***|-4.348***|-4.995***|-6.694***|-3.870***|-4.958***|-5.328***|
||(0.579)|(0.458)|(0.938)|(0.574)|(0.520)|(1.440)|(0.762)|(0.551)|(0.715)|
|B.order dummies|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Mother FEs|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Observations|24082|26999|11086|12920|21685|4808|5748|14750|13278|
|R-squared|0.315|0.324|0.280|0.277|0.268|0.232|0.250|0.220|0.237|

_Notes._ OLS estimates. Robust standard errors adjusted for clustering at the household level in parentheses. Using survey weights.<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup> ,<sup>_∗∗_</sup> , and<sup>_∗_</sup> indicate significance at 1%, 5% and 10% levels, respectively.

composition (columns 5, 8, and 9). As expected, the birth of a girl has no effect on spacing for women who had a first-born boy or mixed gender offspring among earlier-born children. As an additional check, appendix table A.2 shows the results when using the full sample of women with at least three, four, and five children, respectively, and including the interaction terms between the sex composition of earlier-born children with the birth of a girl. Again, the results confirm that mothers tend to significantly reduce spacing between births if they have several daughters: these women are in fact those for whom the pressure for having a son is greater.

Next, I estimate the probability that the birth interval is shorter than 24 and 15 months. The results are shown in table 8: columns (1) and (3) show that, after the birth of any girl, mothers who had two girls as the first two born children are 2.1 percentage points more likely to wait less than 24 months, though not significantly so, and 1.5 percentage points more likely to wait less than 15 months (significant at the 10 percent level). In column (2), the sample is restricted to the first 4 children, to make sure that the effect on spacing is not driven by the behavior of women with many children. The results suggest that the pace at which mothers have children tends to accelerate especially among earlier female births (the third and/or the fourth girl born) rather than later born children. Considering that about 32% of women wait less than 24 month in this subsample, the effect is important and equal to a 11.2% increase. Column (4) shows that the likelihood that the next birth is spaced less than 15 months apart increases by 1.8 percentage points after the birth of a girl for mothers who already had two girls. This is equivalent to a 22% increase given that on average 8% of births are spaced less than 15 months apart in this subsample.

Figure 5 plots the distribution of the length of the interval for the subsample of women with two first born girls (and at least three children ever born) by the sex of the third and/or fourth 23