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The effect of parental labor migration on children’s educational progress in rural china

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Abstract

Due to China’s restrictive household registration system and increasing educational costs tens of millions of internal labor migrants have difficulty enrolling their children in urban schools. As a result, many children are left behind in rural areas when their parents seek urban employment. Using data from two provinces in northeastern China we find that parental labor migration is associated with a .7 grade-level lag in educational attainment among girls. Given that our models control for educational costs and total consumption expenditure, we interpret this as resulting from a re-allocation of girls’ time towards home production in migrant households.

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Notes

  1. In rural China it is not uncommon for older individuals in particular to report their lunar age, which is 1 year older than their age based on the internationally accepted Gregorian calendar. Because the survey documentation implies that the reported age is based on date of birth, we expect that each child's age is their Gregorian age (World Bank 2003). However, as an empirical check we redefined age as reported age minus 1 year and found that this had little impact on our results.

  2. Although we control for total household consumption expenditure per capita, the migration indicator could also proxy for financial resources available from remittances that are not fully captured by the expenditure variable.

  3. The township is a middle-level administrative/geographic unit in China. In order from smallest to largest the geographic units in our dataset are village, township, county, and province.

  4. Although village-level data were initially collected in the summer of 1995, village leaders were re-surveyed in the summer of 1997 to improve the quality of these data. As such, the CLSS is officially a 1995–1997 survey.

  5. The total household consumption expenditure aggregate was constructed by researchers at the World Bank and the University of Toronto. Other than putting the measure in per capita terms, the only modification we make is the subtraction of educational expenses, which we include separately in the model. Detailed information on how the expenditure aggregate was constructed is found in the survey documentation report, Appendix D (World Bank 2003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Lehigh University, 621 Taylor Street, Bethlehem, PA, 18015, USA

    Chad D. Meyerhoefer

  2. Department of Finance, 253 Broadway, New York, NY, 10007, USA

    C. J. Chen

Authors
  1. Chad D. Meyerhoefer
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  2. C. J. Chen
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Correspondence to Chad D. Meyerhoefer.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 4.

Table 4 Descriptive statistics
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Meyerhoefer, C.D., Chen, C.J. The effect of parental labor migration on children’s educational progress in rural china. Rev Econ Household 9, 379–396 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-010-9105-2

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