School of Economics, Capital University of Economics and Business, China.
School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China, China.
Soc Sci Med. 2021 May;277:113908. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113908. Epub 2021 Apr 3.
This study investigates whether adult children's education has a protective effect on parental survival, using data from all waves (2010-2018) of the China Family Panel Studies. We exploited the exogenous temporal and geographical variations in the enforcement of the 1986 compulsory schooling laws in China to construct an instrumental variable (IV) for adult children's education. The IV estimates indicated that the law-induced higher education of adult children led to sizeable improvements in the likelihood of paternal survival, although it had no significant effect on maternal survival. The protective effect on paternal survival was mainly driven by better-educated daughters, while sons' education had only a modest positive effect on maternal survival. Further evidence suggested that such heterogeneity by the gender of adult children might mainly come through more informal caregiving from better-educated daughters to older fathers with a limited role played by financial support from adult children.
本研究利用中国家庭追踪调查（CFPS）所有波次（2010-2018 年）的数据，考察了子女的教育是否对父母的生存具有保护作用。我们利用中国 1986 年义务教育法实施的时间和地理上的外生变化，为子女的教育构建了一个工具变量（IV）。IV 估计结果表明，法律导致子女接受更高层次的教育，显著提高了父亲的生存概率，尽管对母亲的生存概率没有显著影响。对父亲生存的保护作用主要是由受过更好教育的女儿带来的，而儿子的教育对母亲的生存只有适度的积极影响。进一步的证据表明，子女性别方面的这种异质性可能主要是由于受过更好教育的女儿对年老父亲提供了更多的非正式照顾，而子女的经济支持作用有限。
