Growing up with the one-child policy: CEO early-life experiences and corporate investment in China

We examine corporate investment behaviour of Chinese CEOs whose formative years (5-15 years old) overlapped with China's one-child policy period. We construct alternative measures of CEO early-life experience of gender inequality based on the information on the cities where CEOs lived in their formative years during the one-child policy period. We find that a sample CEO, who experienced greater gender inequality induced by the one-child policy, intends to increase investment, and they invest more than their peers. Moreover, experiencing greater gender inequality, women CEOs are more conservative and risk-averse in investment, and they invest less than their peers. In contrast, men CEOs experiencing greater gender inequality are overconfident and risk-taking in investment, and they invest more than their peers. These results remain robust across a set of tests, including the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), Difference-In Difference (DID), and Propensity Score Matching (PSM). We contribute to the debate surrounding China's one-child policy by providing new evidence on how the one-child policy affects the Chinese economy through its corporate sector.