China and some other Asian countries have experienced a large surplus of men of marriageable age. The existing literature studies the impact of sex imbalance using aggregate sex ratios, such as at the county, city, or province level. However, these studies may miss important impacts on health and behavior because the relevance of surplus sons to family decisions mainly stems from pressure conveyed through social interactions with the local reference group.

This paper draws from unique social network data, collected from households' long-term spontaneous gift exchange records (li dan), combined with household panel data from 18 Chinese villages to explore the prevalence of men's localized pressure to get married. The surveyed villages are home to Chinese ethnic minorities, which largely circumvents endogenous fertility decisions on the first-born child due to the implementation of One Child Policy and its associated relaxations afterwards. To identify the effect of pressure to find wives for their sons on parental risky behavior, we focus on comparing families with a first-born boy versus a first-born girl and distinguish the network spillover effect from the direct effect.

The spatial econometric decompositions suggest that the pressure mainly originates from a few friends with unmarried sons and unbalanced sex ratios in the friendship networks, though own village sex ratio and having an unmarried son also affects parental risk-taking behavior. The results are consistent across specifications allowing for long-run and short-run effects. We also find similar patterns for parental working hours, their likelihood to engage in entrepreneurial activities and decision to migrate. In contrast, parents with a daughter do not demonstrate this pattern. Since the sex ratio imbalance in China will probably worsen in the next decade, disentangling the real sources of marriage market pressure may help design policies to improve parental well-being.

Dr. Xi Chen's main research interests involve health economics and development economics in the developing contexts. He recently completed his PhD in applied economics at Cornell. His research seeks to better understand how social interactions affect health behavior and outcomes, how socioeconomic status drives social competition. Most of his current work draws on primary data from China and secondary data from India and Indonesia.

The Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law invites you to a special event and reception to meet the second class of Social Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at Stanford.

Hailing from Malaysia, South Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area, this group is working to advance the rights of women, minority groups and refugees around the world.

Please join us for this special occasion to meet this innovative group, learn more about their work and celebrate their arrival to Stanford.

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The more a country depends on aid, the more distorted are its incentives to manage its own development in sustainably beneficial ways. Cambodia, a post-conflict state that cannot refuse aid, is rife with trial-and-error donor experiments and their unintended results, including bad governance—a major impediment to rational economic growth. Massive intervention by the UN in the early 1990s did help to end the Cambodian civil war and to prepare for more representative rule. Yet the country’s social indicators, the integrity of its political institutions, and its ability to manage its own development soon deteriorated. Based on a comparison of how more and less aid-dependent sectors have performed, Prof. Ear will highlight the complicity of foreign assistance in helping to degrade Cambodia’s political economy. Copies of his just-published book, Aid Dependence in Cambodia, will be available for sale. The book intertwines events in 1990s and 2000s Cambodia with the story of his own family’s life (and death) under the Khmer Rouge, escape to Vietnam in 1976, asylum in France in 1978, and immigration to America in 1985.

Sophal Ear was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011 and a TED Fellow in 2009. His next book—The Hungry Dragon: How China’s Resources Quest is Reshaping the World, co-authored with Sigfrido Burgos Cáceres—will appear in February 2013. Prof. Ear is vice-president of the Diagnostic Microbiology Development Program, advises the University of Phnom Penh’s master’s program in development studies, and serves on the international advisory board of the International Public Management Journal. He wrote and narrated “The End/Beginning: Cambodia,” an award-winning documentary about his family’s escape from the Khmer Rouge. He has a PhD in political science, two master’s degrees from the University of California-Berkeley, and a third master’s from Princeton University.

The U.S.-Japan relationship is not much in the headlines these days—and when it is the stories seem to focus on issues, such as Okinawa and beef, that have bedeviled ties seemingly for decades. But, in the midst of seismic shifts in Asia-Pacific security and global economic relations, shouldn’t the two countries be talking about something else?

Many in American industry have thought so and in 2009 the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan released a white paper calling for a new set of discussions with Japan directed at capturing the innovation and growth potential of the emerging global Internet economy. Accompanying the call were a set of over 70 specific recommendations for discussion in areas ranging from privacy, security, intellectual property, spectrum management, cyber security to competition—an agenda for the future not the past.

The paper found resonance with the new Democratic Party government in Japan and the Obama administration that were searching for a new direction and vocabulary for U.S.-Japan economic relations and were mindful that partnership with Japan in this area strengthened the U.S. hand in dealing with preemptive attempts elsewhere to define rule of the road for the Internet and “cloud computing.” 

The Dialogue was formally launched in the fall of 2010 and its third plenary session is taking place in Washington, D.C. October 16 to 19, 2012. Professor Jim Foster is participating in the Dialogue as a leading member of the U.S. private sector delegation to the talks. He will be coming to Stanford immediately following the joint industry-government meeting on October 18 (the governments will continue in closed-door session through the 19th) and will offer his analysis and insight into the discussions in Washington and their implications for future cooperation between Japan and the U.S. industry in the cloud computing field and for the two governments on challenging issues of broader Internet governance.

Jim Foster is currently a professor in the Graduate School of Media and Governance at Keio University, where he teaches and researches on U.S. foreign policy issues and global Internet policy. He is the co-director of Keio’s Internet and Society Institute. Foster worked as a U.S. diplomat from 1981 to 2006, serving in Japan, Korea, the Philippines and at the U.S. Mission to the EU. He was director for corporate affairs at Microsoft Japan from 2006 to 2011. He is a former vice president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan and a co-author of the ACCJ White Paper on the Internet Economy.

Abstract:

Zainah Anwar will speak on the necessity and possibility of reform in the way Islam is understood and used as a source of law and public policy in Muslim contexts. From Sisters in Islam in Malaysia and its ground-breaking work at the national level to Musawah, the global movement for equality and justice, Muslim women activists today are at the forefront in challenging the use of Islam to justify continued discrimination against women and violations of fundamental liberties. They are producing new feminist knowledge, combining Islamic principles, human rights, constitutional guarantees of equality and non-discrimination, and women's lived realities to break the constructed binary between Islam and human rights, and the disconnect between law and reality. They are publicly challenging traditional religious authorities with alternative understandings of Islam in ways that take into consideration changing times and context. Anwar will share the experience of Sisters in Islam and the global movement it initiated, their work and challenges, and the resulting public contestations and  hope for change. 

About the Speaker: 

Zainah Anwar is currently a visiting Social Entrepreneur in Residence at Stanford for fall 2012 through CDDRL’s Program on Social Entrepreneurship. Anwar is a founding member of Sisters in Islam (SIS) and currently the director of Musawah based in Malaysia, the global movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family. She is at the forefront of the women’s movement pushing for an end to the use of Islam to justify discrimination against women. The pioneering work of SIS in understanding Islam from a rights perspective and creating an alternative public voice of Muslim women demanding equality and justice led it to initiate Musawah in 2009. This knowledge-building movement brings together activists and scholars to create new feminist knowledge in Islam to break the binary between Islam and human rights and the disconnect between law and reality.  

Anwar also writes a monthly newspaper column on politics, religion and women’s rights, called Sharing the Nation. She is a former member of the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia. Her book, Islamic Revivalism in Malaysia: Dakwah Among the Students, has become a standard reference in the study of Islam in Malaysia.