Abstract Existing scholarship reveals important and competing influences of parental migration on children's educational trajectories. On the one hand, in the short term, left-behind children commonly take on additional housework and sometimes place less emphasis on education if they aspire to follow in their parents' migratory footsteps. On the other hand, parental migration often leads to monetary transfers (remittances), which reduces financial pressure on sending households and can strengthen educational aspirations among children left behind. Because previous studies examined these effects on children still completing their educations, the cumulative impact of parental migration on children's educational attainment remains uncertain. In this study, we use retrospective life history data from the Mexican Migration Project to link parental migrations occurring during childhood with children's educational attainment measured in adulthood. Using a novel counterfactual approach, we find that parental migration during childhood is associated with increased years of schooling and higher probabilities of completing lower-secondary school, entering upper-secondary school, and completing upper-secondary school. These associations were strongest among children whose parents did not complete primary school and those living in rural areas. Results from a placebo test suggest that these positive associations cannot be attributed to unobserved household characteristics related to parental migration, which supports a causal interpretation of our main findings. Thus, our analysis suggests that, on average, and particularly among more-disadvantaged households, the long-term educational benefits associated with parental migration outweigh short-term disruptions and strain associated with parental absence.
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The Long-Term Distributional and Welfare Effects of Covid-19 School Closures
Abstract Using a structural life-cycle model, we quantify the heterogeneous impact of school closures during the corona crisis on children affected at different ages and coming from households with different parental characteristics. In the model, public investment through schooling is combined with parental time and resource investments in the production of child human capital at different stages in the children’s development process. We quantitatively characterise the long-term consequences from a COVID-19-induced loss of schooling, and find average losses in the present discounted value of lifetime earnings of the affected children of $2.1\%$, as well as welfare losses equivalent to about $1.2\%$ of permanent consumption. Because of self-productivity in the human capital production function, younger children are hurt more by the school closures than older children. The negative impact of the crisis on children’s welfare is especially severe for those with parents with low educational attainment and low assets.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1757084
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10396328
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Economic Journal
- Volume:
- 132
- Issue:
- 645
- ISSN:
- 0013-0133
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1647 to 1683
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Research on the societal costs of disaster-related US school closures has focused, and due to COVID-19 will likely continue to focus, on pandemics, with very limited research on closures from natural hazards. This is surprising given that school closures occur frequently to protect children, teachers, and staff pre-event as well as post-disaster to convert facilities into emergency shelters, etc. This study investigates the secondary effects from post-flooding, temporary school closures after the catastrophic 2015 flash flood in Richland County, South Carolina. Lost productivity from school closures was quantified using the Human Capital Method. Out of the 208 completed surveys, 75% of households had children that missed school. Post-stratifying survey results on race produced an average of $437 in lost productivity due to school closures and an overall $2175 in lost productivity due to flood-related impacts in general. Expressed in FEMA benefit-cost analysis terms, our study shows that schools have a standard value of $215 per household and per day for the unweighted sample ($180 for the race-weighted sample). Furthermore, households' disutility for a late start is almost as great as their disutility for a school closure. These exploratory findings suggest that unplanned school closures should be minimized, and community characteristics carefully considered to avoid unintended socioeconomic consequences.more » « less
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Abstract Objectives We assessed associations between child stunting, recovery, and faltering with schooling and human capital skills in a native Amazonian society of horticulturalists‐foragers (Tsimane').
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac028
