题目：Does Parental Out-migration Benefit Left-behind Children's Schooling Outcomes?– Evidence from Rural China

主讲人：罗小曼，加州大学戴维斯分校

时间：2020年5月25日，10:00-11:30

举办方式：线上讲座

She is an development economist and a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics at UC Davis, working with Professor Ashish Shenoy and Professor Edward Taylor. Previously she received master of public policy at UCLA, working with Professor Manisha Shah, and B.A. in finance at Nanjing University.

In this paper I investigate how parental out-migration affects the schooling outcomes of children left behind in rural China. In particular, I consider three important and widely-studied mechanisms that migration could affect left-behind children’s school performance: direct effect through parental accompaniment, and indirect effect through child’s study time, and education spending.The major contribution of this paper is to establish a theoretical framework to clarify different pathways involved in the effect of parental migration on child’s schooling performance, and to empirically quantify the importance of these pathways on child schooling in rural China. Applying the model on a household-level data from rural China, I find that parental migration has significant negative total effect on left-behind children’s language scores and math scores, and their language scores are more negatively affected. Further decomposing the total effect into the three channels, I find that the direct effect of migration through parental accompaniment is largely negative, and the indirect effects through study time and income are generally negative as well, but are smaller than the direct effect. Subgroup analysis by child’s gender shows consistent findings, but it calls attention to severe underinvestment in left-behind girls’ education in rural China. The results from this paper can help policymakers design and implement education policy in rural China by accounting for the specific barriers to education presented by the high degree of parental migration.

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