The main goal of this paper is to document the nature of boarding schools and empirically analyze the difference of nutrition intake and malnutrition status between boarding and non-boarding students in western rural China. By using two data sets about boarding schools and boarding students in Shaanxi Province, a representative province in western rural China, this paper finds that dormitory and student canteen facilities in boarding schools are under-equipped and services are poor quality and far below that needed for student development. Poor services in boarding schools and inadequate nutrition intake may be an important cause of low student height-for-age Z-scores (HAZ), as students eating at school have a much lower HAZ on average than that of non-boarding students. Furthermore, girls and students with more siblings have relatively lower HAZ, while the higher the number of parents a student has and the more educated they are exert a positive influence on child nutritional status in terms of HAZ. Finally, our analysis implies that the effective way to decrease the inequality of health, malnutrition and human capital between urban and rural in the long run is to improve the facilities and services of boarding schools in rural China.

Migration is one of the main ways of alleviating poverty in developing countries, including China. However, there are concerns about the potential negative effects of migration on the educational achievement of the children that are left behind in villages when one or both of their parents out-migrate to cities. This paper examines changes in school performance before and after the parents of students out-migrate. Surprisingly, we find that there is no significant negative effect of migration on school performance. In fact, we find that educational performance improves in migrant households in which the father out-migrates.