Parental Migration and Left-Behind Children’s Depressive Symptoms: Estimation Based on a Nationally-Representative Panel Dataset

Mi Zhou, Xiaotong Sun, Li Huang, Guangsheng Zhang, Kaleigh Kenny, Hao Xue, Emma Auden and Scott Rozelle
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Mi Zhou: College of Economics and Management, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang 110866, Liaoning, China
Xiaotong Sun: College of Economics and Management, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang 110866, Liaoning, China
Li Huang: College of Economics and Management, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang 110866, Liaoning, China
Guangsheng Zhang: School of Business, Liaoning University, Shenyang 110031, Liaoning, China
Kaleigh Kenny: Rural Education Action Program, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
Hao Xue: School of Economics and Management, Northwest University, Xi’an 710069, Shanxi, China
Emma Auden: Rural Education Action Program, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

IJERPH, 2018, vol. 15, issue 6, 1-13

Abstract: China’s rapid urbanization in the past several decades have been accompanied by rural labor migration. An important question that has emerged is whether rural labor migration has a positive or negative impact on the depressive symptoms of children left behind in the countryside by their migrating parents. This paper uses a nationally representative panel dataset to investigate whether parental migration impacts the prevalence of depressive symptoms among left-behind children in China. Using DID and PSM-DID methods, our results show that parental migration significantly increases the depression scores of 10 and 11-year-old children by 2 points using the CES-D depression scale. Furthermore, we also find that the negative effect of decreased parental care is stronger than the positive effect of increased income in terms of determining the depressive symptoms status of children in rural China.

Keywords: depressive symptoms; left-behind children; human capital; PSM-DID (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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