Restrictions on Migration Create Gender Inequality: The Story of China's Left-Behind Children
Abstract
About 11% of the Chinese population are rural-urban migrants, and the vast
majority of them (124 million people) possess a rural hukou which severely
restrict their children’s access to urban public schools. As a result, 61 million
children are left behind in rural areas. We use a regression-discontinuity
design based on school enrollment age cutoffs to document that migrants are
significantly more likely to leave middle-school-aged daughters behind in poor
rural areas without either parent present when schooling becomes expensive,
compared to middle-school-aged sons. The effect is larger when the daughter
has a male sibling. Migrant parents send significantly less remittances back to
daughters than sons. Migrants from rural areas adjacent to cities with more
restrictive hukou policies are more likely to separate from children as new
job opportunities arise in nearby cities due to trade-induced shocks to labor
demand. This produces a shift-share IV strategy, when paired with a longitudinal
dataset shows that those children complete 3 fewer years of schooling,
are 41% more likely to fail high school entrance exams, have worse mental and
physical health, and remain poor as adults. Although China’s hukou mobility
restrictions are not gender-specific in intent, they have larger adverse effects on
girls.