Religion as an informal institution: A case of true pure land Buddhism and missing women in early modern Japan

Abstract

In early modern Japan, infanticide was used for birth control and sex selection. However, some historians hypothesized that people who believed in the True Pure Land (TPL) sect of Japanese Buddhism were less likely to commit infanticide. I statistically examine this hypothesis using a quasi-natural experiment of hinoeuma (fire-horse) year with a two-way fixed-effects estimation. Girls born in a hinoeuma year were reckoned to be inauspicious and subjected to sex-selective infanticide. In 1846 and 1906 hinoeuma, TPL-dominant areas experienced a smaller increase in the male-to-female ratio in the cohort than the areas with less TPL dominance. Additional regressions support the hypothesis that the TPL’s prohibition of infanticide led to this smaller effect.