Sex ratios and the red dragon: using the Chinese Communist Revolution to explore the effect of the sex ratio on women and children in Taiwan

In 1949, Mao Zedong and the People’s Liberation Army defeated the Chinese Nationalist Army. Hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese fled to the island of Taiwan. In this paper, I use the demographic consequences of the Chinese Communist Revolution and subsequent Taiwanese military policy to identify the effect of the marriage market sex ratio on women and children in Taiwan. I find that as the sex ratio rises, the bride price relative to the dowry increases, the fraction of female children in a family increases, the total number of children in a family decreases, and human capital investments in children increase.