Effect of Family Policy on People's Willingness to have Children and Its Mechanism
China has fallen into the ranks of low-fertility countries in the world,and the central and lo-cal governments have successively introduced family policies to encourage fertility in recent years.However,these policies are not so effective that the fertility rate and willingness to have kids continue to decline.Previous studies seldom analyzed the effect of Chinese family policy.This paper borrows three dimensions of de-familialization,familialization and de-genderization to construct the classification and evaluation framework of family policies.At the same time,from the perspective of mental accounting theory,this paper further constructs the analytical framework of expenditure cost-policy benefit of fertility behavior,and compares the effects of three different family-oriented policies on fertility intention and their mental accounting mecha-nisms through two survey experiments(N=583+575).The research finds that different family policies have positive impact on fertility intention,and the defamilialization-oriented childcare service policy and the degenderization-oriented extending male paternity leave policy are more effective than the familialization-oriented policy subsidy.In addition to economic costs and oth-er cognitive aspects,fertility decision making is also influenced by subjective sense of acquisi-tion and fairness perception.Childcare service and cash subsidy are effective mainly through increasing working time accounting and economic accounting respectively,while extending male paternity leave mainly through emotional channels to meet the needs for fairness.This study has promoted the empirical research and international comparative study of China's family policy,and provided reference value for improving China's family policy and increasing fertility inten-tion.
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