Maternal Education and Early Childhood Outcomes in China

Abstract

In this paper, we study how maternal education affects children's early childhood health outcomes and the development of social and motor skills. We take advantage of the higher education expansion in China, which creates credible exogenous variation in access to colleges that improves mothers' educational attainment, to examine these effects through an instrumental variable approach. Our results show that increases in years of schooling beyond the nine-year compulsory education level significantly improve children's outcomes. We find the probability of an infant having low birth weight is reduced and the time it takes for a child to start speaking, counting, and walking is shortened. We investigate several mechanisms that could explain these results and find that mothers' schooling is strongly associated with assortative marriage and rural-urban migration. Suggestive evidence also shows mothers with more schooling are likely more aware of how to effectively invest in their children.

Keywords: Higher Education Expansion, Maternal Education, Childhood Outcomes