4:00-5:30
pm on Wednesday, Oct 24th, 2012
608
Academic Hall, CUFE
Abstract
This
paper is inspired by the strikingly large number of children left behind by
migrant parents in rural China. I study the effect of parental migration on the
school enrolment of their left-behind children. I used a probit regression based
on a simple theoretical model. I find evidence of a negative effect of parental
migration on children’s school enrolment, and this negative effect is larger on
the school enrolment of boys than on girls’. Also, the longer the father’s
absence, the bigger the negative impact on rural boys’ enrolment is. The effect
of parental migration is robust to the use of instrumental variable analysis by
instrumenting for parental migration status using “the number of other migrant
household members”.
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