TY  - JOUR
AU  - Lin,Ming-Jen
AU  - Qian,Nancy
AU  - Liu,Jin-Tan
TI  - More Women Missing, Fewer Girls Dying: The Impact of Abortion on Sex Ratios at Birth and  Excess Female Mortality in Taiwan
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14541
PY  - 2008
Y2  - December 2008
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14541
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14541.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ming-Jen Lin
Dept. of Economics
National Taiwan University
21 Hsu-Chow Road, Taipei (100)
Taiwan
E-Mail: mjlin@ntu.edu.tw

Nancy Qian
Department of Economics
Yale University
27 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06520-8269
E-Mail: nancy.qian@yale.edu

Jin-Tan Liu
Department of Economics
National Taiwan University
21 Hsu-Chow Road
Taipei (100), TAIWAN
Tel: 886-2-23519641/520
Fax: 886-2-2351-1826
E-Mail: liujt@ntu.edu.tw
AB  - This paper presents novel empirical evidence on the impact of access to abortion on sex ratios at birth (SRB), excess female mortality (EFM) and fertility in Taiwan. For identification, we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the availability of sex-selective abortion caused by the legalization of abortion. Our results show that the legalization of abortion accounts for almost all of the observed increase in SRB during the 1980s and decreased EFM by approximately 20%. Approximately ten more female infants survived for every one hundred that were aborted. Interestingly, we find that while abortion reduced overall fertility, it increased fertility for older mothers. 
ER  -