This paper examines the relationship between consumption smoothing and excess female mortality, by asking if favorable rainfall shocks in childhood increase the survival probabilities of girls to a greater extent than they increase boys' survival probabilities for a sample of rural Indian children. In order to avert the issue of selection bias due to underreporting of births of girls, a methodology is employed that does not require data on births by gender. The results indicate that favorable rainfall shocks increase the ratio of the probability that a girl survives to the probability that a boy survives.

In this paper, we estimate the effects of children and the differential effects of sons and daughters on men's labor supply and hourly wage rates. The responses to fatherhood of two cohorts of men from the PSID sample are examined separately, and we use fixed-effects estimation to control for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that fatherhood significantly increases the hourly wage rates and annual hours of work for men from both cohorts. Most notably, men's labor supply and wage rates increase more in response to the births of sons than to the births of daughters.