The Effect of Family Size on Education: New Evidence from China's One Child Policy

Laura M. Argys () and Susan Averett ()
Additional contact information
Laura M. Argys: University of Colorado Denver

No 9196, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Social scientists theorize that the inverse relationship between socio-economic status and family size represents a trade-off between the quality and quantity of children. Evaluating this hypothesis empirically requires addressing the simultaneity of the quality and quantity decisions. Researchers have used the unanticipated birth of twins as exogenous variation in family size or the sex composition of the first two children as an instrument for family size with mixed results. We exploit a different source of exogenous variation in family size. The One Child Policy (OCP) in China dramatically reduced Chinese fertility and we examine how the OCP has affected the educational attainment of Chinese migrants to the U.S. Using data from the American Community Survey (2009-2012) and a difference-in-differences strategy our results support the quality-quantity tradeoff theory. We find that education increased more for Chinese migrants born after the OCP than their counterparts from other East Asian countries.

Keywords: family size; quality-quantity tradeoff; migration; education; One Child Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2015-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-edu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published - published in: Journal of Demographic Economics, 2019, 85 (1), 21 - 42

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9196.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Effect of Family Size on Education: New Evidence from China's One-Child Policy (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:iza:izadps:dp9196

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().