Elsevier

Journal of Development Economics

Volume 111, November 2014, Pages 181-195
Journal of Development Economics

Does parental absence reduce cognitive achievements? Evidence from rural China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2014.09.004Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • We study impacts of parental migration on cognitive skills of children left-behind.

  • We distinguish and estimate separately the effects of one vs. both parents absent.

  • We extend this literature by investigating children's learning outcomes.

  • Our estimates show significant adverse effects of the absence of both parents.

  • The impacts of being left-behind by one parent are much smaller and insignificant.

Abstract

Many children worldwide are left-behind by parents migrating for work — over 61 million in rural China alone, almost half of whom are left-behind by both parents. While previous literature considers impacts of one parent absent on educational inputs (e.g., study time, enrollment, schooling attainment), this study directly investigates impacts on children's learning (test scores) and distinguishes impacts of absence of one versus both parents. Dynamic panel methods that control for both unobserved individual heterogeneity and endogeneity in parental absence are used with data collected from rural China. The estimates indicate significant negative impacts of being left-behind by both parents on children's cognitive development, reducing their contemporary achievements by 5.4 percentile points for math and 5.1 percentile points for Chinese, but much smaller insignificant impacts of being left-behind by one parent. Cross-sectional evidence indicates that only absence of both parents is associated with substantially lower family inputs in after-school tutoring.

Keywords

Left-behind children
Migrating parents
Cognitive achievement
China

Cited by (0)

We thank Shuaizhang Feng, John Ham, Chih-Sheng Hsieh, Lars Lefgren, Hyungsik Roger Moon, and seminar participants at the 2013 Asian Conference on Applied Micro-Economics/Econometrics and the 2014 Asian Meeting of the Econometric Society for valuable comments and discussions. We are also grateful to the Co-editor and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and feedback. We acknowledge funding support provided by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Fund (No. 458910), Chinese University of Hong Kong South China Program, and Grand Challenges Canada Grant 0072-03. We also thank the Educational Bureau of Longhui County in China for administrative support, and Fengjiao Chen, Vincent Chow, and Jia Wu for excellent research assistance.