Parental Labor Migration and Children's Educational Progress in Rural China

Abstract

This paper explores the effect of parents temporary labor migration on their children s educational attainment in rural northeastern China. This relationship lies at a cross-section of Chinese household registration policies and recent educational decentralization initiatives, both of which have undergone extensive debate. The effect of migration can be ambiguous because the education and development literatures suggest that higher income from remittances and increased labor-demand from adult absence can affect educational decisions in opposite ways. Using ordinary least-squares, maximum-likelihood estimation, and two-stage least-squares methods, this paper suggests that the labor-demand effect tend to dominate, delaying children s expected progress through school when parents migrate. The negative impact of parents migration on children s education is larger for boys than girls. Relevant policy implications include the possibility of relaxing admission restrictions by household registration status and building schools for migrant children.