Essays on Higher Education and Gender Gap in Investments in Children's Health and Education

Chapter 1 addresses the observation that higher education participants from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds on average attend less competitive universities than their high SES peers. Taking advantage of a unique set of administrative data, which is linked to data reflecting SES measures for each student's postal code of residence, we are able to decompose observed differences in type of university attended. We find that the majority of the observed difference in the type of university attended can be attributed to the application stage: conditional on having the same predicted grades, low SES students apply to less competitive universities than do high SES students. Chapter 2 seeks answer to the question of how maternal years of schooling influence the gender gap in the nurture of children. Empirical results show that although parents believe that girls are capable of getting a higher score in exams than boys, and that girls are more conscientious about their school work, they invest more in boys' health and pay more for boys' education. The exciting bit of the results is that higher maternal education has the effect of narrowing the gender gap in postnatal health investment and education investment of children. Chapter 3 exploits the fact that Family Planning Policy only applies to Han people but that ethnic minority couples' fertility is not affected, to investigate how breastfeeding patterns with respect to gender and birth order differs across ethnic background. Empirical results indicate that legal control for family fertility greatly restrains breastfeeding for children in low parities, especially for girls, and exacerbate the gender gap in middle parity. These effects are most remarkable among large families.