The Policy-Contingent Shift in Housework Effects on Second-Birth Transitions in China

Lu Gao , Hanyang University
Yi Lu Xu, Hanyang University
Sam Hyun Yoo, Hanyang University

Whether husbands’ contributions to household labor shape second-birth transitions in contemporary China is, on existing evidence, an open question: prior Chinese studies have reported positive, null, and negative associations, while successive strands of gender-and-fertility theory generate partially overlapping but distinguishable predictions. We examine the question using two parallel panels from the 2014, 2016, and 2018 waves of the China Family Panel Studies — one spanning the final years of the one-child regime, the other spanning the two years immediately following the 2016 universal two-child policy — and estimate the housework–fertility association for three operationalizations of couple housework held constant across eras. The husband's contribution, whether measured as a share or as absolute logged hours, shows no significant association with second-birth transitions in either primary specification in either era, and this null finding does not shift across the policy boundary. The wife’s absolute housework hours, by contrast, show an across-era shift that reaches statistical significance in a pooled policy-interaction test: weakly positive under the one-child regime, significantly negative under the two-child regime. Within-subgroup estimates across rural/urban residence, educational attainment, and age group show the across-era shift in consistently negative direction with no subgroup reversing sign, supporting the robustness of the main pooled finding. The findings indicate that in the present Chinese setting, the wife’s absolute time burden, rather than within-couple redistribution of housework, is the more fertility-relevant household-level quantity, and that its behavioral meaning is itself policy-regime-contingent.

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 Presented in Session 67. Fertility and Gender Roles