Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/163207 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
ADBI Working Paper No. 716
Publisher: 
Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI), Tokyo
Abstract: 
Using data from a rural household survey for the People's Republic of 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 mathematics. However, unlike many 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 harm caused by parental migration. We explore two channels through which return migrant parents may improve children's school performance. One is that children spend more time studying following migrant parents' return. The other is that return migrant parents spend more on their children's education. We also find evidence suggesting that the remediation effect is stronger for children attending primary school and for daughters.
Subjects: 
migration
left-behind children
educational outcomes
People's Republic of China
JEL: 
J24
O12
O15
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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