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The desire for male children is prevalent in India, where son preference has been shown to affect fertility behavior and intrahousehold allocation of resources. Economic theory predicts less gender discrimination in wealthier households, but demographers and sociologists have argued that wealth can exacerbate bias in the Indian context. I argue that these apparently conflicting theories can be reconciled and simultaneously tested if one considers that they are based on two different notions of wealth: one related to resource constraints (absolute wealth), and the other to notions of local status (relative wealth). Using cross-sectional data from the 1998-1999 and 2005-2006 National Family and Health Surveys, I construct measures of absolute and relative wealth by using principal components analysis. A series of statistical models of son preference is estimated by using multilevel methods. Results consistently show that higher absolute wealth is strongly associated with lower son preference, and the effect is 20%-40% stronger when the household's community-specific wealth score is included in the regression. Coefficients on relative wealth are positive and significant although lower in magnitude. Results are robust to using different samples, alternative groupings of households in local areas, different estimation methods, and alternative dependent variables.

Previously published evidence from the 1992-1993 Indian National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) on the state of childhood immunization showed the importance of analyzing immunization outcomes beyond national averages. Reported total system failure (no immunization for all) in some low performance areas suggested that improvements in immunization levels may come with a worsening of the distribution of immunization based on wealth. In this paper, using the second wave of the NFHS (1998-1999), we take a new snapshot of the situation and compare it to 1992-1993, focusing on heterogeneities between states, rural-urban differentials, gender differentials, and more specifically on wealth-related inequalities. To assess whether improvements in overall immunization rates (levels) were accompanied by distributional improvements, or conversely, whether inequalities were reduced at the expense of overall achievement, we use a recently developed methodology to calculate an inequality-adjusted achievement index that captures performance both in terms of efficiency (change in levels) and equity (distribution by wealth quintiles) for each of the 17 largest Indian states. Comparing 1992-1993 to 1998-1999 achievements using different degrees of "inequality aversion" provides no evidence that distributional improvements occur at the expense of overall performance.