Society, economy and missing girls in 18th century Spain

Abstract

Relying on local-level information in late-18th-century Spain (almost 17,500 locations), this article (1) shows that average child sex ratios were extremely high, a result that cannot be explained by female under-registration, (2) identifies which regions were more prone to suffer from ‘missing girls’, and (3) explores the factors that might be behind this phenomenon in 18th-century Spain. Our results show that, broadly speaking, Southern Spain exhibited an excess of male children. Those areas showing relatively high child sex ratios are associated with precarious economic conditions and a marriage market that resulted in (almost) universal female marriage and a large spousal age gap. Lastly, our model only explains a small part of the variation in child sex ratios, thus suggesting that it is likely that unobserved social and cultural factors, which are more difficult to measure, were also playing a role in triggering gender-discriminatory practices during infancy and childhood.