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”.