Mother's education and child development: Evidence from the compulsory school reform in China

Ying Cui, Hong Liu and Liqiu Zhao
Additional contact information
Ying Cui: School of Economics, Capital University of Economics and Business, China
Liqiu Zhao: School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China, China

No 783, CEMA Working Papers from China Economics and Management Academy, Central University of Finance and Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates the causal impact of mother's schooling on various outcomes of adoles- cent development by exploiting the temporal and geographical variations in the enforcement of compulsory schooling laws in China. Using data from China Family Panel Studies, we find that mother's education increases adolescents' school enrollment, math test scores, college aspiration, and internal locus of control related to education. Mother's education also improves adolescent mental health status and reduces the incidence of underweight. We also find considerable gender heterogeneity in the effects of mother's education. The results further indicate that mother's education leads to an increase in family resources for children and an improvement in maternal mental health and parenting, which we interpret as potential mechanisms behind our findings.

Keywords: Mother's education; School reforms; Child development; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I24 J13 J24 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 24 pages
Date: 2025
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-hea, nep-neu and nep-sea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://down.aefweb.net/WorkingPapers/w783.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Mother's education and child development: Evidence from the compulsory school reform in China (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cuf:wpaper:783

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEMA Working Papers from China Economics and Management Academy, Central University of Finance and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Qiang Gao ().