Maternal education and early childhood outcomes in China

In this paper, we study how maternal education affects children’s early childhood health outcomes and the development of social and motor skills. We take advantage of the higher education expansion in China, which creates credible exogenous variation in access to colleges that improves mothers’ educational attainment, to examine these effects through an instrumental variable approach. Our results show that increases in years of schooling beyond the nine-year compulsory education level significantly improve children’s outcomes. Specifically, we find that more maternal education reduces the likelihood of low birth weight and accelerates the development of skills such as speaking, counting, and walking. We also conduct multiple hypothesis tests to confirm robustness, finding that the positive effects on child development remain significant. Mechanism analyses suggest that maternal schooling is associated with assortative marriage, rural–urban migration, delayed fertility, and potentially greater awareness of effective child care and investment strategies. This study provides new evidence on the intergenerational benefits of maternal education on a comprehensive set of child outcomes in an emerging economy and contributes to the literature by focusing on educational attainment beyond compulsory schooling.