Lugar: Sala de Reuniones del Departamento de Economía nº 2026 (2ª planta del Edificio Los Madroños).

Ponente: Rebeca Echavarri (UPNA & INARBE)

Título: Maternal health, egalitarian values and sex ratios at birth (trabajo conjunto con Francisco J. Beltrán Tapia (NTNU & CEPR))

Abstract: Following improvements in Spanish living standards and maternal health, sex ratios at birth (SRB) steadily increased from the 1950s onwards. The relative number of male and female births, however, jumped abruptly in the late 1970s and reached values close to 109 in the early 1980s before returning to biologically expected values at the end of that decade. Relying on detailed individual-level information between 1976 and 1995 (more than 10 million births), this article attempts to shed light on the factors that drove the inverted U-shaped evolution of the SRB that emerged during that period. The main hypothesis is that biological processes and behavioural responses coexisted in an historical period characterized by the end of a long-term dictatorship that allowed the expansion and modernization of health services and the shift towards more gender-equal values and attitudes. On the one hand, upgrades in the health system significantly improved maternal health, thus reducing the incidence of miscarriages, an issue that disproportionally affects male foetuses due to their greater vulnerability. Although this argument surely contributed to the increase in SRB, explaining the extremely biased values, and the sharp subsequent decline during the 1980s, is more challenging, so we also consider that the extremely high SRB observed might also respond to the increasing availability of technologies that allowed identifying the foetal sex. Families responded to this information providing additional care to pregnancies that carried a male foetus and/or practicing sex-selective abortions. On the other hand, the spread of egalitarian values and attitudes during the transition toward democracy probably mitigated the preference for sons, which might have eventually led to sex-unbiased behaviour in pregnancy. Individual-level data from the 1977 and 1985 Fertility surveys not only confirm that son preference sharply declined during our period of study both in terms of expressed preferences, but also regarding how women behaved after bearing a boy or a girl.