Quantity–Quality Trade-Off and Early Childhood Development in Rural Family: Evidence from China’s Guizhou Province

Jingdong Zhong, Jingjing Gao, Chengfang Liu, Jie Huang and Renfu Luo
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Jingdong Zhong: School of Economics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Jingjing Gao: China Center for Agricultural Policy, School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Chengfang Liu: China Center for Agricultural Policy, School of Advanced Agricultural Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Jie Huang: School of Economics, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, Nanchang 330013, China

IJERPH, 2019, vol. 16, issue 7, 1-29

Abstract: This paper empirically investigates the causal effect of having siblings on the cognitive, language, motor, and social-emotional skills of infants under the age of 2 in rural families in Guizhou Province in China. The results are based on data from a survey conducted in 2017. To effectively relieve the endogeneity induced by selection bias, we applied the matching-smoothing (MS) method to evaluate the effects of having siblings. The results show that, first, having siblings produces significant negative impacts on an infant’s cognitive, language, and social-emotional skills; second, intrahousehold resource allocation is the mechanism behind the Quantity–Quality (Q–Q) trade-off, and it exerts its effects through two key identified channels—the home environment and parental warmth. By spreading the parents’ investment among siblings in terms of both the home environment and parental warmth, having siblings hinders infants’ early development. Our findings provide new evidence for the relation between the Q–Q trade-off and early childhood development in rural families in western China.

Keywords: early childhood development; Quantity–Quality trade-off; intrahousehold resource allocation; home environment; parental warmth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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