Migration, Money and Mother: The Effect of Migration on Children's Educational Performance in Rural China

Migration is widely known as one of the main ways of alleviating poverty in developing countries, including China. However, migration itself is not costless. In recent years, there is an emerging concern about the effect of migration on the educational achievement of the children of migrants in China since most of the young children of school age of the migrants are being left in the village when one or both of their parents move to the city to work. This paper examines the effect of the migration activities of the father and/or mother on the educational performance of elementary school students (First to Fifth grade). With a dataset that collected from a survey designed specifically to examine changes in school performance of children before and after their parents left the village to migrate to the city we use Difference-in-Difference and, propensity score matching approaches. Although the grades of the children from some migrants family are sometimes lower than those from non-migrants family (in the time period before and after migration), somewhat surprisingly, we find that there is no significant negative effect of migration itself on the children's school performance. In fact, in some cases (e.g., after the father migrates), performance improves. Our paper also demonstrates and explains the interaction effects of migration from wealth and household composition.