Date: Oct 30th, 2013
Time: 4:00-5:30PM
Place: General Room 2, 2nd Floor, Zhongcai Building, CUFE
Abstract: This paper examines whether migration of adult children adversely affects the health of the left-behind elderly in rural China. Establishing causal effect is complicated by the fact that there may be unobserved factors influencing both child migration and health of the elderly. I address this endogeneity by using instrumental variable method. The findings show that child migration reduces the health of the elderly, with both physical health and mental health deteriorating with migration of adult children. However, the left-behind elderly report lower difficulty with activities of daily living (ADL). One possible explanation is that they need to rely on themselves upon child migration, which can drive them tougher to handle activities of daily living.