The Impact Of Income Inequality On Family Children’s Educational Expenditure From The Perspective Of Seeking Social Status

With the deepening of market economy reforms,China’s economic has developed rapidly in recent years,but China’s income inequality has increasingly attracted the attention of the people and scholars from different fields.On the other hand,under the current economic background,the family’s education expenditure on children accounts for a large proportion of the family’s consumption expenditure.There have been many literatures that consider various factors affecting family education expenditure from the view of characteristics of the family.However,there are few literatures to study the reasons for the increase in family’s education expenditure from the external environment of the family.Therefore,this article uses the China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)to study the impact of income inequality on family children’s educational expenditure from the perspective of social status.Based on the relative income hypothesis,this article supposes that the utility of commodities is not only related to the amount of consumption,but also related to comparison with others.It is to study how one family’s education expenditure is affected by other families.Then we introduce the concept of status commodities,and decompose income inequality into inequality of opportunity and inequality of efforts,and study whether people will pay more attention to education expenditure when the income gap widens.Using the fixed effect panel model and panel Tobit model,we firstly do empirical analysis of all samples,and do heterogeneity analysis and robustness tests.The research in this paper found that:(1)The children’s education expenditures are status commodities,and the reference group’s average level of children’s education expenditures has a demonstration effect;Income inequality enhances the demonstration effect of education expenditure,so households will increase education expenditure for their children;(3)Using the parameter method,we decompose income inequality into inequality of effort and inequality of opportunity.In the pursuit of children’s future social status,inequality of opportunity,due to environmental factors that cannot be changed by themselves,will inhibit education expenditure.And inequality of efforts,due to their own controllable efforts,will encourage families to increase education expenditure;(4)A qualitative analysis found that low-income families,families with low educational backgrounds,and rural families were the most significantly affected.So income inequality especially increases the burden of education expenditure on vulnerable families.The robustness tests show that the above results are robust.Therefore,the increase in the level of social income inequality will increase education expenditures on children in order to pursue current and future statusBased on the above theoretical analysis and empirical results,this article proposes to promote a rational educational belief and not to over-compare;to pay attention to the education support for vulnerable families and ensure the balanced development of education;controlling the income gap within a reasonable range helps to reduce family education burden.