Working Paper: NBER ID: w30990
Authors: Xuwen Gao; Wenquan Liang; Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak; Ran Song
Abstract: About 11% of the Chinese population are rural-urban migrants with a rural hukou that severely restricts their children's access to urban schools. As a result, 69 million children are left behind in rural areas. We use two regression-discontinuity designs - based on school enrollment age cutoffs and a 2014 policy change that more severely restricted migrants' access to schooling - to document that migrants become discontinuously more likely to leave middle-school-aged daughters (but not sons) behind in poor rural areas without either parent present exactly when schooling becomes expensive and restricted. The effect is larger when the daughter has a male sibling. Migrant parents send significantly less remittances back to daughters than sons. Although China's hukou mobility restrictions are not gender-specific in intent, they have larger adverse effects on girls. Rural residents adjacent to cities that experience shocks to labor demand after China's accession to the WTO are more likely to separate from children to take advantage of new opportunities in cities. Those workers earn much more and advance economically, but longitudinal data reveals that their children complete fewer years of schooling, remain poor, and have worse mental and physical health later in life.
Keywords: migration; gender inequality; hukou system; left-behind children; China
JEL Codes: J13; J16; R23
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Following a policy change in 2014 urging mega cities to control their populations (R23) | parents who had previously migrated to larger cities became 7 percentage points more likely to leave their middle-school-aged daughters behind (J12) |
| Migrants remit significantly less to daughters than to sons (F24) | documented 9% reduction in remittances sent back to daughters (F24) |
| when schooling becomes expensive and restricted (I22) | Migrant parents become discontinuously more likely to leave their middle-school-aged daughters behind (J12) |
| when schooling becomes expensive and restricted (I22) | Migrant parents become discontinuously more likely to leave their middle-school-aged sons behind (J12) |
| Children left behind suffer worse outcomes in terms of education, health, and income (I24) | those exposed to trade shocks being over 10 percentage points more likely to fall into the bottom income quintile later in life (F61) |