Title: Parental Migration and Left-behind Children’s Education: Evidence from a Large Sample of Chinese Rural Children

Speaker: Assistant Professor Fei Wang, Renmin University of China

Time: November 24th, 2017 13:30–14:45

Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building (College of Economics, JNU)

Abstract:

This article explores the relation between parents’ rural-to-urban migration and the education attainment of their children left in rural home, using a 10% sample of the 2010 population census data for Chongqing, a province with the highest share of rural left-behind children in China. Taking advantage of new features of the 2010 census where migrants are traced in their home regions, we manage to define migration in a more precise way. We find that parental migration is associated with children’s higher school enrollment rates, smaller chances of completing junior middle education at ages of 15-17, larger likelihood of progressing to junior middle school after completing primary education, and greater probabilities of proceeding to high school education after finishing junior middle schooling. Supportive evidence shows that the positive correlations between parental migration and children’s education attainment are mainly attributed to higher income earned by migrant parents, while lack of child care in migrant families seems responsible for the lower completion rate of junior middle education. Income effects are particularly prominent if father migrates, while mother’s migration amplifies the negative impact of insufficient child care. Propensity-score matching is applied to alleviate the endogeneity problem, and results remain similar to those from linear regressions.