The Intergenerational Mobility Of Education In Rural China

The intergenerational human capital mobility is an important issue.Parents with higher education have higher earnings can provide more supports for their children. As a result,children's education can also be higher than others.Studies found that parents with higher education levels are indeed associated with children with higher education levels,and parents with higher education in terms of number of years will also have children with more years of education.However,the significant and positive relationship in the levels of education between parents and children dose not necessarily imply causal effects.For example,abilities and other unobserved inherited factors can be the cause of this positive relationship.In this study,we investigate the causal relationship between parents' and children's education levels.The sample in this study comes from China Household Income Project(2002).To control for unobserved ability biases,we use the education expansion during the Culture Revolution in rural China as an instrument for parental education. We find some strong causal relationship of levels of education between parent and children,especially between a mother's and her child's education levels.Two stage Probit model estimates suggest that higher parents' education levels are accompanied by children's higher likelihoods to have at least 10 years of education.Robustness and specification checks are also conducted.We also test different channels through which a mother's education level influences her child's level of education.We find that a mother's decisions on the socioeconomic factors of the family and her husband are important.