I'm Eric Omoreti and I'm a professor of economics at Berkeley.

Okay, very good. So Enrico, a listener wrote to us with a very, very straightforward question,

which is this, in marriages where a baby boy is born, is there a less chance of the husband

leaving the marriage? So we can get into the details later, but can you, you know, economists

are famous for never giving a yes or no answer to anything. I'm wondering if you can give

us a yes or no answer to that question. Yes, it's an easy answer. And the answer is yes.

Parents who have firstborn girls are significantly more likely to be divorced. And so parents who

have firstborn boys are significantly more likely to stay together.

From WNYC, this is Freakinomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

Here's your host, Stephen Duffner.

You just heard Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California Berkeley, tell

us a striking fact that parents whose first child is a daughter are significantly more likely

to be divorced than if they'd had a son. Now, how does Mereddy know this? He wrote a research

paper along with the economist Gordon Dahl called the Demand for Sons. They analyzed US census

data from 1960 to 2000, along with other data, to measure the effect of a firstborn child's

gender and marital stability. We find that fathers are significantly less likely to be living

with their children if they have daughters versus son. This overall effect is fairly large.

It's about 3.1% lower probability of a father for families with a girl. And can you put

that into numbers of families or daughters for me then? Yes, we estimate that over a 10-year

period that accounts for about 50,000 firstborn daughters who are living without their father.

Wow. So Enrico, you're saying that there is a significant, not huge, but significant

effect on marriage that a firstborn daughter will have. That a firstborn daughter will

...