The Influence Of Parents' Migration For Work On Children's Cognitive Ability

With the development and prosperity of China's socialist market economy and the acceleration of the process of urban integration,more and more surplus labor force of backward area transfers to developed area ceaselessly,forming a large group of migrant workers.Just from the rural labor force's migration for work,according to the "migrant workers monitoring survey report" of the national bureau of statistics,the number of migrant workers has gradually increased from 168.21 million in 2014 to 172.66 million in 2018,with an increase of 4.45 million.And there is still a trend to continue to increase in the future.Considering that the migrant workers include not only farmers,but also a large number of workers with household registration in cities and towns,and there are also cases of migrant workers abroad,the actual migrant workers in China are much larger than this data.For migrant workers with children,most of their children can not go out with their parents because of the restrictions of urban-rural dual economic structure,household registration system or family conditions.They can only rely on the care of their elders and relatives to live in their homes.Therefore,the migration of parents will have an impact on all aspects of their children.In the past,most literatures generally focused on the impact of parents' migration for work on children's physical and mental health and education,reflecting the problems their children encountered in the process of human capital accumulation.However,from other perspectives,this paper takes children's cognitive ability as the research object to explore the relationship between parents' migration for work and children's cognitive ability.Cognitive ability is an important measure of personal ability.With the advent of the era of knowledge economy,the level of cognitive ability is not only closely related to personal growth and development,but also related to the progress of the whole country and society.Under this understanding,ensuring the large number of children of migrant workers can get good cognitive development is both the need of promoting educational equity,and also the need of obtaining a "talent dividend" to cope with social and economic reform.Based on the 2014-2015 data from China Education Panel Survey(CEPS),this paper investigates the influence of parents' migration for work on their children's cognitive abilities.The empirical analysis using the propensity score matching method(PSM)can accurately identify the causal relationship between variables to a certain extent.The estimation results show that parents as migrant workers will have a negative impact on their children's cognitive ability,resulting in the lower level of cognitive ability of children of migrant workers than that of children of non-migrant workers.By grouping the samples,it is found that the influence on the cognitive ability of girls is greater than that on the cognitive ability of boys,and the difference in the cognitive ability of girls is more significant;For children of different ages,their cognitive abilities are significantly negatively affected,while the impact on the lower age group is greater than that on the older age group;For different regions,in the central regions,parents' migration for work has a significant negative impact on children's cognitive ability,while in the western and eastern regions,it is estimated that parents' migration for work make children's cognitive ability lower,but not statistically,Significant.