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Can fertility policies have unintended effects on who gets married? We investigate the effect of the relaxation of the one-child policy, one of the strictest large-scale fertility policies of all time, on marriage. Before everyone was allowed to have two children with the two-child policy, some were already exempted from the strict one-child limit. Theory suggests that if a larger family size is preferred, the relaxation of the one-child policy could increase marriage rates among those previously not exempted. Yet, those exempted could also have had a ``child advantage in the marriage market'' as they brought the potentially valuable characteristics of having two children. In a context with a strong sex ratio imbalance with more men than women, the advantage can increase men's chances of getting married. In this case, we expect the marriage rate to change only for men as those previously advantaged ``lose out'' from the policy change. We use detailed policy data on the main exemptions from the one-child policy and match them with individual data from the China Family Panel Study collected between 2010 and 2018. We find that with the end of the one-child policy, those previously exempted as less likely to get married. The effect is mainly driven by men -- the likelihood of women getting married is only weakly affected. The results suggest that there was indeed a significant child advantage in the marriage market which, coupled with the skewed sex ratio, distorted who got married.
