Identifier

1120

Document Type

Discussion Paper

Date of Paper

Summer 6-1-2025

Abstract

China’s accession to the WTO created new economic opportunities in certain cities. A shiftshare identification strategy shows that residents of adjacent rural areas migrated in and advanced economically. Longitudinal panel data on children reveals that their sons benefit, but counter-intuitively, daughters suffer worse mental and physical health, complete fewer years of schooling, and remain poor later in life. We explore why, and learn that hukou policy that restricts migrant children’s access to urban public schools is a factor. Triple difference research designs reveal that migrant parents become discontinuously more likely to leave daughters (but not sons) behind in rural areas exactly when and where hukou policy makes schooling more expensive. 69 million Chinese children are left behind in rural areas, and girls are harmed even when trade liberalization increases family income. Millions of poor Asian and African workers separate from their children in search of better livelihoods in richer countries, so this is a problem of global magnitude.

Acknowledgements

We thank seminar participants at Yale, Princeton, NBER Summer Institute in Development Economics, Johns Hopkins-SAIS, NBER SI on Gender, Sciences Po, Univ. of Sydney, Zhejiang U, Northeastern U, NUS, East Asia Applied Economics Workshop, CUHK(Shenzhen), AFD-World Bank Conference on Migration and Development (BU), UEA2023 European Meeting, the Asian Meeting of the Econometric Society, and the Annual Conference on China and the Global Economy (HKU), and to Bilge Erten, Claudia Goldin, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jessica Goldberg, Elias Papaioannou, Wolfgang Keller, Ferdinando Monte, Nancy Qian, Jessica Leight, Alice Evans, Albert Park, Emily Hannum, Nick Ryan, Mark Rosenzweig, Nina Pavcnik, Prashant Bharadwaj, Maggie Liu, Peter Hull, David Weinstein, Dean Yang, Jipeng Zhang, Yifan Zhang for suggestions, econometric advice, and sharing data. Ran Song acknowledges the support from Yale-NUS and the Tan Chin Tuan Chinese Culture Civilization Program.

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