About 60 million children under the age of 18 are left behind by their parents in rural China. This paper studies the effect of migrant parents on the educational attainment of their left-behind children in rural China. A theoretical model of optimal schooling in the context of parental migration is proposed. Then, reduced-form equations are estimated using probit model, instrumental variables probit model, and linear instrumental variables model. Results show that parental migration has a negative effect on children’s school enrollment. This negative effect is significant and sizable on the school enrollment of boys, but insignificant on the school enrollment of girls. The most important source of this robust negative effect on boys is the absence of fathers. Results suggest that left-behind mothers or relatives cannot fulfill fathers’ role successfully in disciplining boys and help with their educational needs.
This paper provides a specific application of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in order to explain the effect of population growth on the environment. The main purpose is contributing to enhance the connection between theoretical and empirical analysis. We develop an overlapping generations (OLG) model that featured with an inverted U-shaped relationship between pollution emission and income and we examine the effect of population growth on this relationship. Simulations illustrate the model's predictions that positive population growth makes the EKC steeper and have higher peak, but it does not fundamentally change the pollution-income relationship. The econometric analysis finds evidence supporting our model's predictions using Chinese data at the province level.
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