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Quantity-Quality and the One Child Policy:The Only-Child Disadvantage in School Enrollment in Rural China

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  • Nancy Qian

Abstract

Many believe that increasing the quantity of children will lead to a decrease in their quality. This paper exploits plausibly exogenous changes in family size caused by relaxations in China's One Child Policy to estimate the causal effect of family size on school enrollment of the first child. The results show that for one-child families, an additional child significantly increased school enrollment of first-born children by approximately 16 percentage-points. The effect is larger for households where the children are of the same sex.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 14973.

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Date of creation: May 2009
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14973
Note: CH
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Find related papers by JEL classification:
  • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
  • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
  • O1 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development

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