Testing the tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family is complicated by the endogeneity of family size. Using data from the Chinese Population Census, this paper examines the effect of family size on child educational attainment in China. We find a negative correlation between family size and child educational attainment, even after we control for the birth order effect. We then instrument family size by the exogenous variation that is induced by a twin birth, and find a causal link between family size and children’s education. We also find that the effect of family size is more evident in rural China, where the public education system is poor. These findings suggest a quantity-quality tradeoff of children in developing countries.

Migration is widely known as one of the main ways of alleviating poverty in developing countries, including China. However, migration itself is not costless. In recent years, there is an emerging concern about the effect of migration on the educational achievement of the children of migrants in China since most of the young children of school age of the migrants are being left in the village when one or both of their parents move to the city to work. This paper examines the effect of the migration activities of the father and/or mother on the educational performance of elementary school students (First to Fifth grade). With a dataset that collected from a survey designed specifically to examine changes in school performance of children before and after their parents left the village to migrate to the city we use Difference-in-Difference and, propensity score matching approaches. Although the grades of the children from some migrants family are sometimes lower than those from non-migrants family (in the time period before and after migration), somewhat surprisingly, we find that there is no significant negative effect of migration itself on the children’s school performance. In fact, in some cases (e.g., after the father migrates), performance improves. Our paper also demonstrates and explains the interaction effects of migration from wealth and household composition.

In this paper, we examine the effect of maternal education on the health of young children by using a large sample of adopted children from China. As adopted children are genetically unrelated to the nurturing parents, the educational effect on them is most likely to be the nurturing effect. We find that the mother's education is an important determinant of the health of adopted children even after we control for income, the number of siblings, health environments, and other socioeconomic variables. Moreover, the effect of the mother's education on the adoptee sample is similar to that on the own birth sample, which suggests that the main effect of the mother's education on child health is in post-natal nurturing. Our work provides new evidence to the general literature that examines the determinants of health and that examines the intergenerational immobility of socioeconomic status.

In interpreting the positive relationship between spousal education and one’s earnings, economists have two major hypotheses: cross-productivity between couples and assortative mating. However, no prior empirical study has been able to separate the two effects. This paper empirically disentangles the two effects by using twins data that we collected from urban China. We have two major innovations: we use twins data to control for the unobserved mating effect in our estimations, and we estimate both current and wedding-time earnings equations. Arguably, the cross-productivity effect takes time to be realized and thus is relatively unimportant at the time of the wedding. Any effect of spousal education on wedding-time earnings should more likely be the mating effect. We find that both cross-productivity and mating are important in explaining the current earnings. Although the mating effect exists for both husbands and wives, the cross-productivity effect only runs from Chinese husbands to wives. We further show that the cross-productivity effect is realized by increasing the hourly wage rate rather than working hours.

In China, a growing awareness that many areas have been left behind during an era characterized by market reform has raised concerns about the impact of community disadvantage on schooling. In this paper, I investigate whether villages exert distinct influences on student achievement. Building on these results, I explore the relationship between student achievement and resources present in the community. Results indicate that children who live in communities with higher levels of economic and social resources have higher mathematics scores, on average.

This paper empirically estimates the returns to education using twins data that the authors collected from urban China. Our ordinary least-squares estimate shows that one year of schooling increases an individual’s earnings by 8.4 percent. However, once we use the within-twin-pair fixed effects model, the return is reduced to 2.7 percent, which suggests that much of the estimated returns to education in China that have been found in previous studies are due to omitted ability or the family effect. This finding suggests that well-educated people are faring well in China mainly because of their superior ability or family background advantages, rather than because of knowledge that they acquired at school. We further investigate why the true return is low and the omitted ability bias high, and find evidence that it may be a consequence of the distinct education system in China, which is highly selective and exam oriented. More specifically, we find that high school education mainly serves as a mechanism to select college students, and has zero returns in terms of earnings. In contrast, both vocational school education and college education have a large return that is comparable to that found in rich Western countries.

This paper examines the emergence of labour markets in China through the lens of returns to rural education. It demonstrates that methodology plays an important role in explaining the low estimates of returns in previous studies. When wages are defined on an hourly basis and sample selectivity is controlled, estimated rates of return rise. In addition, using data on households (n=1199) followed over 15 years (1988-2002), the paper shows that returns have risen over time. Finally, using households from the same community, it is shown that the returns rise even more when the sample includes workers with demographic and employment profiles more like those in the rest of the world (i.e., young and working in urban areas). In fact, the paper finds that the returns to education are close to 10% for young wage earners. When looked at in total, the results show that the returns to rural education in China are completely consistent with other developing countries. Finally, these results indicate that China's labour markets are becoming more functional over time.