Does Higher Education Lead to Fewer Children? Evidence from China

DOI

10.2991/aebmr.k.220405.047How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Fertility; Education; Effect of parents’ education

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship of parental education on fertility using the Fixed-Effects model through a national dataset-CFPS (China Family Panel Studies). The fixed-effect estimation can control the time effects and the province-specific effects, therefore allow us to avoid potential omitted variable bias and ensures external validity. The finding suggests that both parents’ education have a negative effect on fertility, with fathers having roughly 1/3 of the effect of mothers: each additional year of female education reduces the number of children born in the family by 0.024, while each additional year of male’s education reduces the number of children born in the family only by 0.008. This relationship is highly robust across different family income levels. Our results extend previous literature, which mainly focuses on mothers’ education and provides a systematic understanding of how parents’ education contributes to fertility. Therefore, this paper can provide support for implementing fertility and education policy in China, and also serve as a reference for other developing countries.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press International B.V.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Hui Yu
AU  - Xiwen Zhao
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/04/29
TI  - Does Higher Education Lead to Fewer Children? Evidence from China
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 7th International Conference on Social Sciences and Economic Development (ICSSED 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 281
EP  - 289
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/aebmr.k.220405.047
DO  - 10.2991/aebmr.k.220405.047
ID  - Yu2022
ER  -