Educational Competition,pressure For Children To Enter Higher Education And Loss Of Mothers’ Income

Since the reform and opening up,China’s economy has developed rapidly.On the one hand,the reform and opening policy itself has made an indelible contribution to economic development;on the other hand,the restoration of the college entrance examination has accelerated the accumulation of human capital in China,which is also a great driving force for rapid economic growth.With the popularization of compulsory education,China’s human capital is accelerating.Considering the importance of human capital to economic growth,it is extremely important to explore the sources of human capital accumulation.The rapid accumulation of human capital in China not only benefits from the continuous growth of financial education investment,but also benefits from the long-term emphasis of families on children’s education investment under the Confucian cultural tradition.In family education investment,in addition to cash-based explicit education expenditures,families also make implicit education investment by giving up potential income and increasing energy escort.The family’s implicit education investment behavior has not yet received widespread attention from the academic circles,but it is undoubtedly of important practical significance for the accumulation of human capital in China.The family education investment includes not only the explicit education investment that the family uses for the extracurricular tutoring and training of the children,but also the implicit education investment that the family makes by investing more time and energy to accompany the education of the children.And this kind of family’s implicit education investment behavior is more realized at the cost of family giving up potential income,and it is also an important family education investment behavior in essence.Existing literature studies have paid more attention to explicit investment behavior in family education expenditures,while less attention has been paid to family implicit education investment,and there are few literatures that measure and identify the scale of family implicit education investment.In fact,the implicit education investment behavior of Chinese families has become a common social phenomenon and has become an important force in promoting the rapid improvement of China’s human capital.According to the "2019 Domestic Family Children’s Education Investment Survey",78.3%of parents in Chinese families expressed their willingness to sacrifice their personal lives for their children’s education.At the same time,it is increasingly common for family members,especially mothers,to take care of their children’s education.Under the influence of China’s traditional cultural concept of "men dominate the outside and women dominate the interior",women are more responsible for the internal affairs of the family,and one of their important duties is to take care of their children.There are also studies that have found that the role of mothers in Chinese urban families has broken through the traditional connotation of caring for children,presenting a new feature of "education brokers" in the role of mothers.Mothers will devote more energy to planning and accompanying children’s education in the hope of Help children gain advantages in education competition(Yang Ke,2018).This means that under the gender concept and the tradition of family division of labor,the family’s implicit education investment behavior is more from the mother,so identifying the impact of children’s education pressure on the mother’s income is an important perspective to observe the family’s implicit education investment behavior.This paper uses the exogenous impact of children’s education pressure on the importance of family education as the identification framework,effectively stripping away the interference of family’s implicit support expenditure behavior,using the policy stipulated that the annual school entrance time is September 1 as an instrumental variable,and estimating the mother’s The potential income abandoned by the pressure of children’s education competition provides micro evidence for identifying the family’s implicit education investment behavior.The empirical results of this paper show that the pressure on children to enter higher education will significantly reduce their mother’s monthly income by 19%,while the father’s income does not change significantly.Heterogeneity analysis found that the income of mothers with high education and non-state-owned industries is more likely to be affected by the pressure of their children to enter higher education.At the same time,the incomes of mothers of only-child and boy-bearing families will suffer more wage losses due to more emphasis on children’s education.Using the admission rate of key universities in the region to reflect the pressure of entering higher education among regions,it is found that the higher the pressure for children to enter higher education,the greater the decline in the mother’s income.The above conclusions are valid under various robustness tests.The innovation of this paper is to use the instrumental variable method to identify the family’s implicit education investment behavior under the pressure of children’s education,and provide a new perspective for better understanding of China’s human capital accumulation and family labor supply decisions.The disadvantage is that only the 2005 census data meets the research content,but the time is relatively long.There may be a certain difference between the household decision-making in 2005 and 2020.