Trade Liberalization and Marriage: Evidence from China

In view that few studies focus on the topic that how does trade liberalization affect marriage, which is of great practical significance. Based on the microdata of Urban Household Survey from 2002 to 2009, exploiting industry difference in tariff cut and regional variation in industrial structure before the WTO accession, this paper constructs regional tariff cut indicator and employs the methodology of local labor market shock to explore the impact of trade liberalization on women’s marriage status. Our main findings are as following: Firstly, regions that initially specialized in industries facing greater exposure to tariff cut shock are associated with relatively slower decrease of women non-marriage rate, and slower increase of women marriage rate, both of which indicate the adverse effect of women marriage formation, but tariff cut doesn’t affect women divorce rate significantly. Moreover, the adverse effect comes from tariff cut shock specific to male employment. Furthermore, the coefficients of interest pass multiple robustness tests, including instrumental variable estimation method, placebo test, shortening the sample age range, eliminating partial sample data, considering population mobility, controlling for interference effect of a series of policy shocks, employing current tariff rate and bargaining tariff rate, etc. Secondly, the potential mechanism analysis finds that tariff cut shock affects marriage formation adversely through the channel of the negative shock to male job returns. Thirdly, the heterogeneity test indicates that the impacts of tariff cut shock on women’s marriage status are heterogeneous across different regions, such as the East and the Midwest, different social and cultural environments, such as regions with high and low internet penetration, regions with larger and smaller number of dialect pieces, regions with higher and lower degree of marketization, groups with different levels of education including college degree and above, high school or technical school, middle school and below, different age groups including age above 30 years old and age below 30 years old. Finally, based on our main finding, we bring forward corresponding policy suggestions, including establishing allowance guarantee system specific to tariff cut shock, accelerating the development of internet infrastructure and the reform of education supply.