Title of Lecture: How the Comprehensive Two-Child Policy Affects Families' Second-Child Birth Decisions
Time: 9:00am - 10:00am, 28 October 2021
Venue: Conference Room 119, Wenqin Building
Moderator: Prof. Lu Yuanping
Guest Speaker: Ge Run
  PhD, School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University
Abstract：
  In response to a sharp decline in the birth rate and rapid ageing, China began implementing a comprehensive two-child policy in 2016. This paper employs a double difference method to find that the comprehensive two-child policy significantly increases the likelihood of households having a second child, and that this effect remains largely unchanged from 2016-2018. The additional number of second children born as a result of this policy accounted for 86% of the annual number of second children born in the country in 2016-2018. In addition, the paper finds that the effect of this policy is not significant for households where the wife is in the workforce and for households where the wife's income is a high proportion of the couple's total income, but it is significant for households living with their parents and for households with a kindergarten in the community (village). Data findings in this paper suggest that if the three-child policy is implemented in China in 2020, then in the short term there will be about 409,000 additional three-child births per year.