Effects of parental labor migration on education of children left behind

It is now widely recognized that parental migration may have significant effects on children who are left behind, particularly in terms of educational outcomes. From theoretical perspective, parental labor migration can boost the educational investment due to relaxing financial constraints, however, long-term parental absence also leaves children unsupervised and thus likely to cause them lag behind in school. While there are large number of empirical literature evaluating the net effect of parental migration on children’s education(Wen & Lin 2012; Shen, Hu, Hannum 2021; Cortes, 2015; Jampaklay, 2006; Antman, 2012), previous published studies are limited to local surveys and a majority of them were based upon data from over 20 years ago, it is unclear if reflect the current situation especially in China. This thesis aims to use national data from China Family Panel Study(CFPS) in recent years to address the research gaps and provide a systematic understanding of relationship between parental labor migration and education of children left behind. I first did an extensive literature review of existing theory and empirical paper which explains potential mechanisms of how parental migration on education, then, I construct a logit model to examine the association between parental labor migration and the dropout rate from compulsory schooling to noncompulsory schooling. Contrary to expectations, after controlling for demographical factors, fixed regional and time effects, this study did not find a significant relationship between parental migration on education of children left behind. This result may be explained by the fact that technological development in the last decade has made parenting less limited to geographical distance. However, these findings may be limited by the data, as the data sample is not very large, there may be some effects but not detected