Where are all the Asian ladies?

A nice example of applied economics making a difference. The issue (and the title of the article) is: What happened to 100 million missing Women? In Asian countries the ratio of men to women is much higher than it is elsewhere. The existing evidence, presented by economist Anartya Sen, indicated that it was a cutlural phenomena - these countries were mistreating their lady friends. But was it culture or (also) something else?

Excerpt from the article:

Sen had used the measurement tools of economics to uncover a jarring mystery and to accuse a culprit-misogyny. But now another economist has reached a startlingly different conclusion. Emily Oster is an economics graduate student at Harvard who started running regression analyses when she was 10 (both her parents are economists) and is particularly interested in studying disease. She first learned of the 'missing women' theory while she was an undergraduate. Then one day last summer, while doing some poolside reading in Las Vegas-the book was Baruch Blumberg's Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus-she discovered a strange fact. In a series of small-scale medical studies in Greece, Greenland, and elsewhere, researchers had found that a pregnant woman with hepatitis B is far more likely to have a baby boy than a baby girl. It wasn't clear why-it may be that a female fetus is more likely to be miscarried when exposed to the virus.

Read the rest. It is a fascinating article. Link