The Causal Effects of Parents’ Schooling on Children’s Schooling in Urban China

J. Behrman, Yuqing Hu, Junsen Zhang
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引用次数: 7

Abstract

Parental schooling is widely thought to improve child outcomes. But most studies on parental-child relations are associative, without control for estimation problems, such as unobserved intergenerationally-correlated endowments, if causality is of interest. The few exceptions are relatively recent studies that focus on high-income countries (HICs), with their much different contexts than the low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in which the vast majority of children globally are growing up. This paper estimates the causal (conditional on the assumptions for the model) relationships between parents’ schooling and their children’s schooling in the most populous LMIC, using adult identical (monozygotic, MZ) twins data from urban China. Our ordinary least-squares estimates show that one-year increases in maternal and parental schooling are associated, respectively, with 0.4 and 0.5 more years of children’s schooling. However, if we control for genetic and other endowment effects by using within-MZ fixed effects, the results indicate that mothers’ and fathers’ schooling have no significant effects on children’s schooling. Our main results remain with various robustness checks, including controlling for measurement error. These results suggest that the positive associations between children’s and parents’ schooling in standard cross-sectional estimates in this major LMIC are mainly due to the correlation between parents’ unobserved endowments and their schooling and not the effects of their schooling per se.
中国城市父母教育对子女教育的因果影响
人们普遍认为父母教育可以改善孩子的成长。但是,大多数关于亲子关系的研究都是关联的,如果对因果关系感兴趣,则无法控制估计问题,例如未观察到的代际相关禀赋。少数例外是相对较新的研究,这些研究主要关注高收入国家(HICs),这些国家的背景与全球绝大多数儿童成长的低收入和中等收入国家(LMICs)大不相同。本文使用来自中国城市的成人同卵(单卵,MZ)双胞胎数据,估计了人口最多的低收入国家父母受教育程度与子女受教育程度之间的因果关系(以模型假设为条件)。我们的普通最小二乘估计表明,母亲和父母的受教育时间每增加一年,孩子的受教育时间就会分别增加0.4年和0.5年。然而,如果我们使用mz内固定效应来控制遗传和其他禀赋效应,结果表明母亲和父亲的受教育程度对儿童的受教育程度没有显著影响。我们的主要结果仍然是各种鲁棒性检查,包括控制测量误差。这些结果表明,在这个主要低收入中等收入国家的标准横截面估计中,儿童和父母受教育程度之间的正相关主要是由于父母未被观察到的禀赋与他们的受教育程度之间的相关性,而不是他们受教育本身的影响。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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