There are a lot of variations in the child bearing policies for remarried couples across different provinces in China. Such policies can have profound effects on a large number of important family related issues (described below) but they are not studied in the existing literature. This project aims to first document at the province X urban/rural cell level, the following statistics: (1). Ages at first marriage for men and women; (2). Age gaps between husbands and wives in first marriages; (3). Age for giving first birth; (4). Fraction for giving second births when permitted by the fertility policy; (5). Divorce rates in first marriages; (4). Ages at divorce; (5). The custody arrangement of the children born in the first marriage; (6). Fractions of divorced couples that remarry; (7). The characteristics of the re-marriages: age gaps between husbands and wives, the prior marriage histories of the new couples, the prior child bearing histories of the new couples; (8). child bearing histories of re-marriages. Second, we examine the relationship between these variables and the prevailing fertility policies.
The results from the research proposed here will serve as the basis for an external grant application where we will propose to build and estimate models of marriage, fertility, divorce and remarriage, as well as intrahousehold bargaining in the shadow of China's fertility policies to account for the individual behavior at the micro level, and then use estimated model to simulate the effects of potential counterfactual policies.