The impact of parental migration on children's school performance in rural China

A substantial proportion of China's rapid economic growth is attributed to its large number of rural to urban migrants, but most of these migrants' children are left behind in rural areas, mainly due to China's household registration system. Any attempt to identify the impact of parental migration on children's school performance may encounter the problem of endogeneity. We use unique survey data from more than 7600 4th and 5th grade students from 74 rural elementary schools. Using an instrumental variable estimation, our results indicated that having migrant parents can marginally reduce a child's math score rank by 15.60%, which implies that the current economic growth in China partially jeopardizes the future of the next rural generation. Based on a bivariate probit model, the results show that compared to neither parents being migrants, migration of the father reduces the rank of a child's math score by 8.37%, and migration of the mother reduces the rank by 23.30%.