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Effect of Migration on Children's Educational Performance in Rural China

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Abstract

Migration is one of the main ways of alleviating poverty in developing countries, including China. However, there are concerns about the potential negative effects of migration on the educational achievement of the children that are left behind in villages when one or both of their parents out-migrate to cities. This paper examines changes in school performance before and after the parents of students out-migrate. Surprisingly, we find that there is no significant negative effect of migration on school performance. In fact, we find that educational performance improves in migrant households in which the father out-migrates.

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Notes

  1. Although the ages of children ranged from 6 to 16, only few children in the sample were older than 14.

  2. The results of our analyses, however, do not depend on the choice of using the second term scores from the first and fifth grades. As a robustness check, we also used average scores for the whole year instead of just for the second semester. In another check, we compared scores that averaged scores from first and second grade to scores that averaged scores from fourth and fifth grade. Our results remain largely the same in these cases.

  3. There are several issues to discuss when considering our measure of income. The value of the house only includes the part of the house used for domicile purposes and the value of assets that were used for farming and non-farm businesses was not included. Yuan is the Chinese currency. One dollar was about 7.6 yuan during the time of our survey. Finally, we admit that we only have a rough proxy for income. Because of this it is possible that we will not be able to identify the impact of income on grades (since the coefficient of the variable could be biased down to zero). The cross sectional variation for income (using our measure), however, does show that there is at least a negative correlation (richer households have children with higher grades). In fact, there are reasons to expect a positive effect of income on grades. The literature (eg, Kandel and Kao, 2001) has shown that the positive relationship between the father's migration and the school performance partly stems from the financial resources provided migration, which lowers the likelihood of children's labor force participation and increases resources for consumption of education-related goods.

  4. The term, wealth, when used in the rest of the paper will refer to the value of housing assets only.

  5. Scores may also differ among households with different household demographic compositions. According to our data, students from households in which there are no siblings (70.3 points) scored slightly lower than those from households with siblings in 2006 (71.5 points). Such a finding is consistent with Brown and Park's study (2002), which found that children with older siblings have significantly higher test scores than their peers.

  6. Graphs of distributions of propensity scores that show the common support are available upon request.

  7. This is achieved by using the STATA command ‘nnmatch.’

  8. In Table 2 we only report the coefficients on the treatment variable. The rest of the results are suppressed for brevity but are available from the authors upon request. We report the results for 24 different regressions.

  9. For completeness in Table 3, we include the results of the effect of Any Parent Migrated on school performance, but, in fact, this is a duplication of the results from Table 2, row 1.

  10. There is also another potential source of endogeneity that we are not able to account for in the analysis. It is possible that unaccounted for shocks, either in the local economy or in individual households, affect both parents’ migration activities and students’ grades. If these shocks systematically affect all the households, then it is possible that our coefficients also are biased due to the fact that we did not account for this type of unobservable heterogeneity. In this case, it is difficult to determine the direction of the bias. These shocks could be either negative (eg, the family suffers a crop failure or family sickness) or positive (eg, the family receives an inheritance or enjoys a bumper crop) and can lead to negative or positive bias in our estimates.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Chengfang Liu, Renfu Luo who have spent uncountable days coordinating the survey and cleaning data. A special thanks to all the enumerators, school principals and students. We are also grateful for the useful comments from Belton Fleisher and two anonymous referees. We acknowledge grants to support field research from The Ford Foundation (Beijing), Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-YW-N-039) and support for follow-up research from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (70803047). The Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Y607420) and the Social Sciences Foundation of Zhejiang Province (07CGLJ005YBQ).

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Chen, X., Huang, Q., Rozelle, S. et al. Effect of Migration on Children's Educational Performance in Rural China. Comp Econ Stud 51, 323–343 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/ces.2008.44

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