The Impact of Parental Migration on Offspring’s Education Investment: Evidence from Left-Behind Children in China

Abstract

Educational investment of families in their children is related to the sustainable development of both individuals and society. This paper uses data from China Family Panel Studies to study the impact of rural parents’ internal migration on education investment in left-behind children in China. The results show that parental internal migration has a significant negative impact on educational investment in left-behind children. The results persisted after further treatment for endogeneity and multiple robustness tests. Mechanism analysis shows that while increasing the family income, rural to urban migration reduces parents’ recognition of children’s education, thus reducing the family’s investment in left-behind children’s education. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the negative impact of both parents’ going out was the largest, followed by only the father going out, while only the mother going out was no longer significant. The negative effect of inter-provincial out-going is greater than that of intra-provincial out-going. Girls were negatively affected more than boys; middle school students were more affected than primary school students. Our findings suggest it is necessary to further eliminate labor market discrimination caused by household registration and improve educational quality of rural public schools. The lessons learned from China are valuable for other developing countries with large numbers of rural citizens migrating to cities.