近日，北京大学市场经济研究中心主任秦雪征教授的合作论文《Quarter of Birth, Gender Inequality, and Economic Development》荣获第九届“中国劳动经济学者论坛”年会优秀论文一等奖。

该研究基于中国微观数据，发现出生季度对个体生命周期结果具有显著影响，且这一“出生季度效应”在女性中明显强于男性。研究进一步指出，这一性别差异主要源于农业生产季节性波动在家庭内部资源配置中的性别不对称影响，在“重男轻女”偏好背景下，农业生产周期通过影响新生儿早期投入，放大了女性与男性之间的发展差距。相关结论从新的角度揭示了经济发展在缓解性别不平等方面的重要作用。

Abstract：Like in many countries, we find that people born in the fourth quarter have better lifecycle outcomes in China. But interestingly, this birth quarter effect (BQE) in China is significantly larger for females than for males. We conjecture that the gendered BQEs are driven by the seasonality in agricultural production, which affects intrahousehold neonatal investment differentially by gender due to son preference. Our empirical evidence supports this mechanism. Furthermore, exploiting weather shocks to agricultural productivity and the quasi-experimental economic reform in 1979, we show that economic development reduces the gender gap in BQEs by relaxing household resource constraints.