The causal effects of parents’ schooling on children's schooling in urban China

Parental schooling is widely thought to improve child outcomes. But most studies on parental-child relations are associative, without control for estimation problems, such as unobserved intergenerationally-correlated endowments, if causality of interest. The few exceptions relatively recent that focus high-income countries (HICs), with their much different contexts than the low- and middle-income (LMICs) in which vast majority children globally growing up. This paper estimates causal (conditional assumptions model) relationships between parents’ children's populous LMIC, using adult identical (monozygotic, MZ) twins data from urban China. Our ordinary least-squares show one-year increases maternal paternal associated, respectively, 0.4 0.5 more years schooling. However, we genetic other endowment effects by within-MZ fixed effects, results indicate mothers''and fathers’ have no significant main remain various robustness checks, including controlling measurement error. These suggest positive associations standard cross-sectional this major LMIC mainly due correlation endowments not per se.