caregivers for the elderly. However, in 1995, there was a massive expansion of pension coverage. While previous pension schemes were limited to workers in the formal labor force, the 1995 legislation provided compulsory coverage to self-employed individuals in rural areas, including farmers and fishermen. This marked a significant shift given that nearly a quarter of the workers in Korea were self-employed at the time. To finance this effort, every citizen was required to contribute 9.5% of their income to the pension program (Ebenstein 2014).

Ebenstein (2014) tests the hypothesized impact of social insurance on son preference using Korean census data on births observed between 1990 and 2000 for couples where the father was at least 35 years of age, and the mother was at least 30 years of age. He uses a difference-in-difference approach to estimate this impact. He looks at how the expansion of pension coverage to selfemployed workers affected the male fraction of births, after controlling for changes in the male fraction of births borne by salaried workers who were already covered by the pension scheme. His difference-in-difference estimate shows that the introduction of mandatory social security was associated with a 2.21 percentage point decrease in the male fraction of births between 1990-1994 and 1995-2000.

This evidence suggests that parents in Korea altered their preference for sons in response to the policy change. However, Ebenstein (2014) himself notes that this analysis is not without its limitations. The data for trends in births prior to 1995 are not extensive enough to ensure that the key assumption for difference-in-difference estimation - pre-treatment parallel trends between the treatment group (self-employed workers) and control group (salaried workers) - holds.

Aside from the debate on the impact of enacted policy changes, it is important to highlight the legislative measures that the Korean government did not take until the mid-2000s, after sex ratios had started to normalize. The male family head system or _hojuk_ (the basis for patrilineal succession) was not abolished in Korea up until 2005/06, despite active efforts by women’s groups to do so. Following the abolishment of this system in 2005, the family-based registration system was replaced with an individual based registration system, marriage between individuals in the same lineage was allowed unless they were relatives within 8 degrees, couples could jointly decide on their children’s family name, children in remarried families could change their family name, and under-age adoptees had the same rights as other children in the family (Shin 2006; Boer & Hudson 2017). The fact that this key legislation for gender equity was not passed until the late 2000s raises the question of whether state (in)action delayed the normalization of sex ratios in Korea.

_Lessons learned from the Korean case_ The Korean case is interesting in that it highlights both the success and failure of public policy in reducing gender inequity. On the one hand, the government’s economic development agenda created conditions that undermined the institutional basis for son preference. The spread of employment opportunities allowed people to save up for retirement, the daily conditions of urban life freed individuals from the rules of the clan and allowed diffusion of new ways of thinking, and the rise in women’s education and labor force participation changed parents’ valuation of daughters. On the other hand, the state did not undertake necessary legislative reform (particularly 43