Preference for Sons in the US: Evidence from Business Names

I estimate preference for passing on businesses to sons by examining how common words son and sons are compared to daughter and daughters in the names of businesses.

In the US, all businesses have to register with a state. And all states provide a way to search business names, in part so that new companies can pick names that haven’t been used before.

I begin by searching for son(s) and daughter in states’ databases of business names. But the results of searching son are inflated for three reasons:

• son is part of many English words, from names such as Jason and Robinson to ordinary English words like mason (which can also be a name). 
• son is a Korean name.
• Some businesses use the wordson playfully. For instance, sonis a homonym of sun, and some people use that to create names like son of a beach.

I address the first concern by using a regex that only looks at words that exactly match son or sons. But not all states allow for regex searches or allow people to download a full set of results. Where possible, I try to draw a lower bound. But still, some care is needed in interpreting the results.

Data and Scripts: https://github.com/soodoku/sonny_side

Overall, I find that a conservative estimate of the son-to-daughter ratio is between 4 to 1 and 26 to 1 across states.