Does children’s marriage matter for parents' mental health？Evidence from China

How to effectively alleviate mental disorders among elderly individuals is an important issue. Children are important financial and spiritual supporters of parents. However, whether there are upward spillovers from children to parents remains understudied. Using the instrumental variable (IV) method and data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this paper estimates the causal effect of children's marriage on the mental health of older parents. The IV estimation results demonstrate that having unmarried children is associated with a significant deterioration in parental mental health, especially in older, less educated, poor and male groups. Further evidence suggests that having unmarried children leads to significant changes in parents' economic behaviors, including labor supply, consumption, and savings; this indicates that parents are more likely to actively respond to their children’s unmarried status by increasing labor supply, reducing consumption and increasing savings rather than by engaging in negative behaviors.     

Exposure to socially influential peer parents: Evidence from cadre parents in China

Parents with a special social status generate spillover effects to other parents and children. Because cadres (government officials) in China have a broad influence on resource allocation, their presence elicits responses from surrounding parents and students. Exploiting random classroom assignments in Chinese middle schools, we find that increased exposure to classmates' cadre parents raises parents' attention to their children's friendships and guidance over schoolwork. We also find evidence suggesting that parental changes raise the child's test scores. The findings highlight parental adjustments as a mediator of the external influence of peer parents on children.     

Does school shutdown increase inequality in academic performance? Evidence from COVID-19 pandemic in China

The school shutdown due to the global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) can lead to an increase in educational inequality through disproportionately affecting disadvantaged children. We use data from a unique survey of 7202 junior high school students and their parents from Shaanxi province to explore whether the school shutdown enlarged the educational gap between students with different parental socioeconomic statuses (SES) during the pandemic. We find that students with more highly educated parents experienced an increase in relative test rankings after the shutdown period. A 1-year increase in parents' education led to a relative 0.18-percentile increase in students' rankings of total test scores. We also identify the mechanisms behind the enlarged gap by means of heterogeneity analyses. We show that parents' education mainly affected children's academic performance through parents' engagement in their children's homeschooling, mitigating the negative impacts of Internet addiction on students, and serving as substitutes for teachers who were unable to teach well online.     

共同富裕背景下父母受教育程度对子代收入的影响——基于CGSS2017年调查数据

以 CGSS（中国综合社会调查）2017年的微观数据为基础,分析父母受教育程度对子代收入的影响,同时考察子代受教育程度的中介作用。研究发现：父母受教育程度对子代收入有显著正向增收效应,且父亲的影响程度低于母亲;父母受教育的不平等会进一步加大子代收入差距;在父母受教育程度对子代收入的影响中,城镇、女性和东西部地区更为显著;子代受教育程度在父母受教育程度对子代的增收效应中存在部分中介作用。     

No longer left-behind: The impact of return migrant parents on children's performance

Using data from a rural household survey in China in 2009, we examine the impact of parental migration on children's educational outcomes. Consistent with the findings of a large empirical literature, we find that parental migration has a significantly negative impact on left-behind children's educational outcomes as measured by test scores in Chinese and math. But unlike much of the existing studies on the subject, we focus on the remediation effect of return migrant parents on once left-behind children's performance. This empirical strategy allows us to avoid the endogeneity issue concerning the migration decision that may have contaminated previous studies. We find evidence that return migrant parents help alleviate the harms caused by parental migration, and the remediation effect is stronger for children attending middle schools, and stronger for daughters. We also find suggestive evidence that return migrant parents improve children's performance through increases in after-school study time and education-related expenditures, following the return of migrant parents.     

Is care by grandparents or parents better for children's non-cognitive skills? Evidence on locus of control from China

This study investigates the effect of grandparental involvement in childcare on children's locus of control (LOC), which is an important non-cognitive skill that affects children's future development. We use data from the China Family Panel Studies, which is a nationally representative survey, and employ instrumental variables to address the endogeneity of family childcare choice. We find that children with grandparental care have more external LOC than children in the sole care of their parents do; that is, they are more likely to attribute individual success to external factors, such as luck, fate, and family background. This finding is robust to different measures of grandparental involvement in childcare and different model specifications, as well as a minor violation of the exclusion restriction of the instruments. We further examine the potential mechanisms underlying this effect. Grandparents have more external LOC than parents do, which can affect children's LOC through intergenerational transmission of LOC. Their parenting attitudes and styles are also different from parents' in that grandparents take less responsibility for children's academic performance than parents do and are less strict with children. In addition, grandparental care induces adverse effects on children's family environment.     

Sibling Rivalry and Strategic Parental Transfers

This paper develops a noncooperative Nash model in which two siblings compete for their parents' financial transfers. Treating sibling rivalry as a “rent-seeking contest” and using a Tullock-Skaperdas contest success function, we derive the conditions under which more financial resources are transferred to the sibling with lower earnings. We find that parental transfers are compensatory and that the family as an institution serves as an “income equalizer.” Within a sequential game framework, we characterize the endogeneity of parental transfers and link it to parents' income, altruism, and children's supply of merit goods (e.g., parent-child companionship or child services). We show that merit goods are subject to a “moral hazard” problem from the parents' perspective.     

Effect of Migration on Children＇s Self-esteem in Rural China

China＇s rapid economic growth has been facilitated by its large volume of rural to urban migration. China ＇s projected future development, especially increasing urbanization, implies that such migration will further intensify. However, migration does not come without cost. There are concerns about the potential negative impacts of migration on children＇s care, education, and, in particular, the self-esteem of children left behind in villages where one or both parents have out-migrated to cities. In this paper, we employ unique survey data collected from Shaanxi Province, where more than 4700 ninth grade students from 36 rural junior high schools in five counties were surveyed in late 2011. The results show that having both parents migrate into cities significantly reduced children ＂s self-esteem. The effects are also gender sensitive. Girls that had a father or both parents who had out-migrated were inclined to have lower self-esteem than boys. Moreover, our study findings indicate that parental migration decreased children ＂s self-esteem more for individuals with initial low self-esteem.     

Child Labor and the Interaction between the Quantity and Quality of Children

This article analyzes the impacts of child labor on the interaction between the quantity and quality of children in the spirit of Becker and Lewis. It shows that, without child labor, the quantity of children can be a normal good so that it increases with parental income under some fairly standard formulations. However, the correlation between fertility and parental income becomes negative when the role of child labor is considered. The model also implies that fertility increases with the wage rate of child labor. Moreover, it suggests that government intervention not only directly affects the supply of child labor but also influences parents' decisions on fertility, which indirectly determines children's labor market participations.     

Does parental migration impede the development of the cooperative preferences in their left-behind children? Evidence from a large-scale field experiment in China

In human capital theory, noncognitive abilities play an essential role in individual and societal success. Parents' migration for work purposes may inhibit the development of children's noncognitive abilities, but its influence on children's cooperation preferences remains unclear. Using three one-shot public goods games, we examine the impacts of parental migration on the development of children's cooperation preferences and whether introducing punishment mechanisms could partly exacerbate or offset the effects. We conducted a large-scale field experiment with more than 1600 rural students aged 6–16. Our main findings are as follows. First, the cooperation level of non-left-behind children increases significantly with age, while being left behind may affect this stable development track. Specifically, we find that paternal migration significantly decreases children's cooperation levels, while maternal or both parents' migration does not. Second, punishment mechanisms can significantly promote children's cooperation levels and offset the negative effect of paternal migration. Exogenous punishments work across ages, while endogenous punishments work only among middle school students. However, as the extent to which children were left-behind deepens, the offsetting effects of the punishment mechanisms gradually weaken.     

科技工作者满意度对主观幸福感、未来预期的影响——基于新疆兵团1 077名科技工作者的调查数据

提高科技工作者满意度、主观幸福感和对未来的预期，有助于提升科研绩效，推动科技进步和发展。基于新疆兵团科技工作者的问卷调查，借助结构方程模型（SEM）分析科技工作者满意度的影响因素及其对主观幸福感和未来预期的影响。结果表明：自我成就感和个人发展空间是科技工作者工作本身满意度的重要影响因素；学术氛围、领导重视程度和管理水平、进修培训等因素对组织环境满意度影响较大；科技工作者非常重视子女教育、社会保障等；随着年龄增大、职称提高和相对收入的增加等，科技工作者幸福感增强，但由于职业高原问题，使得他们对未来的预期降低；工作本身满意度和社会环境满意度显著正向影响科技工作者的主观幸福感；组织环境满意度和社会环境满意度显著正向影响科技工作者对未来的预期。提高科技工作者的综合满意度要注重物质和精神多方面激励，规范科研组织管理制度，加大科研投入，提高区域基础教育和社会保障。     

Parenting style and the development of noncognitive ability in children

We investigate the impact of parenting style on children's noncognitive ability development using data from China. Based on an extensive set of questions of caregiver-child interaction, we distinguish parenting style (i.e., respectful and disciplinary) from traditional material and time parental investment. We find that respectful parenting style significantly influences the formation of children's noncognitive ability. Our results suggest that with detailed measures of parenting style and parental investment, children taken care by parents and grandparents do not exhibit significant differences in noncognitive ability. A further investigation of unobserved heterogeneity based on different techniques reveals a causal and long-lasting relationship from parenting style to noncognitive ability.     

Educational differences in parental time devoted to childcare in China

The intergenerational transmission of education in China has drawn extensive public and academic attention. This paper explores the differences in the amount of time Chinese parents spend on childcare stratified by education level and investigates the factors driving these differences. The analysis shows that more educated parents devote more time to childcare than less-educated parents. The educational differences in parental childcare time are particularly pronounced among working parents, parents with school-age children, and parents in the provinces where educational institutions are relatively scarce. Much of the extra childcare time is directed to educational care and travel with children. Compared to households in which the mother has less than a junior high school education, households with university-educated mothers spend 74 min more per day on childcare, with 58% of the extra time devoted to children's learning and education.     

Like father,like son? Parental input,access to higher education,and social mobility in China

This paper studies the role of parental input in university access in the context of a 10-fold expansion of China's higher-education sector since 1999. Using a Logit regression, we find that an increase in a parent's education level significantly raises their child's probability of entering university. Moreover, the effects of parental involvement and children's trust towards their parents on university entrance are highly significant. The results are robust to Probit and Linear-Probability-Model specifications. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that for rural and/or worse-educated families, parental involvement significantly affects the child's access to university, while for urban and/or better-educated families, the child's own study attitude is key for progression to university. To address the confounder of genetic inheritance, we use regression discontinuity and two-stage least squares and find that the nine-year compulsory education policy launched in 1986 not only increased the education years of the first generation by about 1.66 years, but has also had a lasting effect by raising the second generation's probability of access to university by 11.77%.     

Do tiger moms raise superior kids? The impact of parenting style on adolescent human capital formation in China

How parenting style influences human capital accumulation is an important yet under-researched topic in the economics literature. Based on the two-wave longitudinal dataset of Chinese Education Panel Survey (CEPS), this study explores the impact of parenting style on adolescents' human capital formation, including cognitive and non-cognitive skills in China. Following the mainstream approach in development psychology, the measurement of parenting style is constructed from two dimensions – demandingness and responsiveness, and further classified into four types: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful. We find that both demandingness and responsiveness of parents have positive effects on children's academic performance, while parents' responsiveness play a substantial role in the formation of children's cognitive skills (measured by the standardized cognitive skill tests) as well as socio-emotional skills (measured by mental health, self-confidence, motivation and extraversion). Putting together, the authoritative parenting style characterized by high demandingness and high responsiveness is associated with the best outcome measures among the four parenting types in cultivating children's human capital formation. Moreover, we find that student time-allocation, extracurricular activities and parent-teacher interactions may serve as important channels of the parenting influences, and that there exist moderate interactive effects between fathers' and mothers' influences and between the demandingness and responsiveness of parenting styles.     

Human Capital and Hours Worked of Children in Cambodia: Empirical Evidence for Policy Implications*

This study uses data from the Cambodian Child Labor Survey 2001/02 (CCLS‐2001/02) to investigate the trade‐off between child labor and their human capital formation. It also investigates the determinants of child schooling and that of the income earned from child labor. This study finds that children's education is a significant determinant of their wage rate, which implicitly explains the logic behind the household's decision to allow a child to both work and study, and thus explains why parents keep investing in their children's education. We also find that non‐poor households and fathers’ and mothers’ education have statistically significant effects on child schooling. Finally, this study has found that if children's average working hours are below the threshold level of 22 h per week, then education is not affected. These research findings have policy implications for the human capital development of children, as well as for broader social policy in Cambodia.     

Love Actually? Dissecting the Marriage–Happiness Relationship

Using theoretical concepts based on identity economics, the present paper empirically tests the idea that adherence to social norms to get married can provide an additional utility gain from marriage. Norms to get married should be stronger among more traditionalist individuals, so they should put more emphasis on the mere fact of getting married and put less emphasis on match quality. In the empirical analysis, we used the East Asian Social Survey to estimate and compare both OLS and instrumental variables results. In line with the theoretical predictions, there seems to be an identity‐based happiness gain from marriage for traditionalist individuals. These findings can be interpreted as evidence for identity‐based utility effects from marriage. The results also show important differences between OLS and instrumental variables results, confirming the importance of addressing endogeneity properly.     

New “useless education theory”: Highly educated parents' expectations for their children's education—Evidence from the one-child policy

Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) 2010 and a strictly implemented one-child policy as a quasi-experiment, this paper analyses the changes in parents' educational expectations of their children and the underlying mechanisms in a fuzzy regression discontinuity framework. It was found that one-child policy compliers have lower educational expectations for their children after acquiring an advanced education than those who did not. The finding remains valid after robustness analysis and placebo tests. Combined with an examination of the intergenerational effects of birth, this finding may be related to parents' assessment of and responses to educational returns and equality of educational opportunities. It was also found that parents with lower educational attainment in the high-income group have higher educational expectations than those with higher educational attainment, while for those with lower income, there is no significant difference between higher educational attainment and otherwise, which indirectly verifies the causal inference of this paper. The finding of this study explains the new “useless education theory” and provides a new perspective for understanding the intergenerational transmission of education.     

Parental Behavior and the Value of Children's Health: A Health Production Approach

Data on individual children and on sibling pairs are used to examine how family resource allocations affect children's health and to estimate willingness to pay for reduced acute illness in children. Results highlight the importance of accounting for the endogeneity of child health and suggest that children with greater stocks of health capital whose parents invest in preventive and remedial medical care experience fewer days of illness. Estimated willingness to pay to avoid one day of illness-induced school loss is about $100 to $150, a range broadly consistent with limited prior evidence but substantially more than unit values applied in recent policy analyses. All else equal, willingness to pay is higher among single parents and for uninsured children, and the estimated income elasticity is only 0.14. Implied aggregate benefits of reductions in children's sick time associated with air pollution control may be substantial.     

The family circumstances of women migrating permanently or temporarily to Sundsvall in the nineteenth century

Abstract

The aim of this article is to identify the factors which lead some women to migrate to the town of Sundsvall in northern Sweden. Analysis of the life histories of a cohort of women bom between 1815 and 1819 in parishes close to Sundsvall revealed that even before the middle of the nineteenth century, Sundsvall was beginning to emerge as an important destination but that it was service, rather than marriage, that motivated migration.

It was also established that the social position of the woman's father was one of the important determinants of her migration, service and marriage histories. Daughters of farmers were more likely to marry than the daughters of non-farmers. They would also marry earlier. In respect of their record as a servant, daughters of farmers would enter service later, work for fewer employers and be less likely to re-enter the parental home having once left for a service post. Daughters of non- farmers were, however, more likely to move to Sundsvall implying that the weakness of the parental family economy may have fostered such migration.

Inter-acting with social position was the place of the woman within the sibling set. Daughters who were the first or second born children of farmers, for example, were less likely to become servants but more likely to spend part of their adulthood in the town of Sundsvall. However, the departure of daughters from the parental household rarely resulted in a childless parental household. A number of (generallyyounger) siblings remained while many of the daughters, particularly of non-farmers, returned to their parents after a number of spells of service.