刘扬、杨耀武：New “useless education theory”: Highly educated parents’expectations for their children’s education—Evidence from the one-child policy

    中文标题：新教育无用论：高学历父母对子女教育的期望——来自独生子女政策的证据
    作者：刘扬（浙江海洋大学经济管理学院）
    杨耀武（中国社会科学院经济研究所）
    通讯作者：杨耀武
    来源：《China Economic Review》2022年第72卷
    Abstract：Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) 2010 and a strictly implemented one-child policy as a quasi-experiment, this paper analyses the changes in parents’ educational expectations of their children and the underlying mechanisms in a fuzzy regression discontinuity framework. It was found that one-child policy compliers have lower educational expectations for their children after acquiring an advanced education than those who did not. The finding remains valid after robustness analysis and placebo tests. Combined with an examination of the intergenerational effects of birth, this finding may be related to parents’ assessment of and responses to educational returns and equality of educational opportunities. It was also found that parents with lower educational attainment in the high-income group have higher educational expectations than those with higher educational attainment, while for those with lower income, there is no significant difference between higher educational attainment and otherwise, which indirectly verifies the causal inference of this paper. The finding of this study explains the new “useless education theory” and provides a new perspective for understanding the intergenerational transmission of education.
    Keywords: Education level；Educational expectation；One-child policy；Fuzzy regression discontinuity
    附件：刘扬、杨耀武：New “useless education theory”: Highly educated parents’expectations for their children’s education—Evidence from the one-child policy