Evidence on the existence of a trade-off between child quantity and child quality, as
suggested by Gary S. Becker, is still inconclusive. This also holds true for empirical studies on
China that exploit for identification the country’s One-Child Policy (OCP) as an exogenous source
of variation in the number of offspring. However, this body of literature suffers from a number of
shortcomings, in particular measurement error in the key policy variable (a household’s coverage by
OCP) and in the outcome variable of interest (schooling choices, i.e. child quality). Using census
data for China and a continuous OCP variable that can address these shortcomings, the results
provide evidence for the existence of a sizeable quantity-quality trade-off within households with
mothers who are Han and have agricultural Hukou