Social Spillovers of Parental Absence: The Classroom Peer Effects of ‘Left-behind’ Children on Household Human Capital Investments in Rural China

AbstractWhile the human capital consequences of rural-to-urban migration on left-behind children have been well-documented in developing countries, there is limited evidence regarding the social spillovers of parental migration on households without parent-child separation. This study investigates the effects of migration-induced left-behind children on household human capital investments in their non-left-behind peers. Leveraging the random student-class assignment within middle schools in rural China, we find that the share of left-behind children in class has significant negative impacts on household financial and time investments in non-left-behind classmates, especially out-of-school education expenditure. We also find heterogeneous effects demonstrating that the adverse spillovers are relatively larger among students who are boys, in grade nine, and from low socioeconomic status families. Further, our results suggest that exposure to left-behind classmates adversely affects non-left-behind students’ perceived quality of school life, cognitive and noncognitive skills, and their parents’ beliefs about returns of human capital investments. We interpret these findings as candidate mechanisms underlying the associations between parental absence and household investments in non-left-behind children. Our study sheds new light on the ‘costs’ of rural-to-urban migration in sending areas, which include not only welfare loss to families being left behind but negative spillover effects on non-left-behind households.Keywords: parental absenceleft-behind childrenhousehold human capital investmentspeer effectsrural China AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank anonymous referees and editors for their constructive comments. The data and codes used for this study are available upon request.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 See Zheng et al. (Citation2022) for a literature review on the effects of parental migration on the short- and long-term human capital of left-behind children.2 See Supplementary Materials for more details about the sampling design of the CEPS.3 Given that the individual himself is removed from the ‘urn’ (the same grade) from which his peers are chosen, the peers for LBC are selected from a group with a slightly lower proportion of LBC than the peers for non-LBC. As a result, there is a mechanical negative relationship between one’s left-behind status and the share of LBC of randomly-assigned peers. According to Guryan et al. (Citation2009), such a bias could be corrected by simply controlling for the proportion of LBC of all individuals in the ‘urn’.4 The kernel distribution and descriptive statistics of class-level LBC proportion are shown in Supplementary Materials Figure S1.5 We conduct seemingly unrelated estimations for the subsamples and statistically test the between-group differences in coefficients of the LBC variable (the proportion of LBC in a class).6 Using the predetermined academic record in grade six, instead of contemporary test scores, helps address potential simultaneity issues. We have also used contemporary test scores on subjects of Chinese, mathematics, and English to compute students’ ranking distance. The results remain qualitatively similar, which are available upon request.7 We have also examined the associations between the proportion of LBC in class and each item of the parental ‘demandingness’ index and ‘responsiveness’ index. As shown in Supplementary Materials Table S3 and Table S4, the estimation results remain qualitatively similar.8 The kernel distribution and descriptive statistics of the proportion of LBC in class using alternative definitions of LBC are shown in Supplementary Materials Figure S2.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72003173, 72103182]; Humanities and Social Science Fund of the Ministry of Education of China [21YJC790171]; Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province, China [LY21G030008]; Project funded by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [2023M730715], and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Provincial Universities of Zhejiang [XR202206]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.