Like parents, like children? Intergenerational poverty transmission in China

Abstract

This study examines the effects of a father and mother's human and social capital on the income of their children (progeny) in China using the 2014 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey. The results indicate that: 1) the effects of the human and social capital of the father and mother on the progeny's income are heterogeneous. Specifically, the father's education, the nature of father's household registration (hukou), and the nature of the mother's household registration have little effect on their progeny's income. However, the mother's education has a positive and significant effect on progeny's income. 2) The effect of the mother's education on her progeny's income, although significant, is limited, and on average the marginal contribution of the mother's education on the natural logarithm of the progeny's income is only 1.1%.3) The progeny's own human capital, such as health, education, foreign language ability, and professional ability, significantly affects his or her income. 4) The results obtained from quantile regression and sub-sample regression with different age cohorts support the above findings. Therefore, the effective means of intervening against the intergenerational transmission of poverty should be to help the progeny improve their human capital, rather than starting with their parents.

Bridge of Rainbow: Association Between Internet-Based Social Media Use and Homosexuality Inclusion in China

“…Furthermore, as mothers are the primary caregivers of families in Chinese tradition, children's attitudes toward society are affected by mothers to a large extent (Xu and Huang, 2018 ). This result is consistent with that of a study that focused on intergenerational poverty transmission, which empirically validated the idea that a mother's education had a more positive and significant effect on a child's income than a fathers' (Yang et al, 2021b ).…”