LAUSR

ABSTRACT With China's termination of the longstanding one-child policy and its implementation of a universal two-child policy since 2016, it remains an open empirical question whether the Chinese, including more than 200 million rural-to-urban migrants, are willing to have a second child. Using the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey data, this study compares the intention of having a second child between urban local women and rural-to-urban migrant women in Chinese cities. We find significantly lower second-child fertility intentions among migrant women, despite their younger average age than local women. Employing the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition technique borrowed from labour economics, we reveal that education and son preference both play particularly prominent roles in explaining the lower second-child fertility intentions among rural migrants. First, more education is found to promote second-child fertility intentions in urban China. Rural migrants’ fertility intentions are depressed by their lower educational levels. Second, in urban China, when the first child is a boy, a couple tends to have a lower intention to have a second child. This fertility-depressing effect of already having a son is particularly pronounced among rural migrants, and moreover, compared with urban locals, a higher percentage of rural migrants’ first child is a son.