Purpose: This paper aims to understand the motivations behind married men preferring sons and to quantify the association between a couple’s stated son preferences. Son preference is an endemic problem in India. With half a million female foetuses aborted each year, the root causes of son...

Despite its economic success, India has made little progress towards meeting its Millennium Development Goal targets of reducing undernourishment, particularly among children. In this paper, we use nationally representative datasets, the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS II and NFHS III) and...

New sex-selective abortion technologies allow parents-to-be to implement their preference for sons more easily than in the past. With an unmet demand for sons in India, a better understanding of what leads respondents to prefer sons is important from a policy perspective. Stated son preference...