Ability and Intrahousehold Allocation in Gansu Province, China
Penn collection
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Contributor
Abstract
This paper analyzes the strategies employed by households in rural China to allo- cate educational expenditure to children of dierent endowment, examining whether parents use educational funding to reinforce or compensate for variation in endow- ment. Employing climatic shocks as an instrument for children's endowment yields results indicating that parental expenditure is preferentially directed to children of lower endowment. This result appears robust to the potentially confounding effects of gender and grade level and holds across a number of measures of expenditure. This analysis is consistent with a hypothesis that parents use the allocation of household resources to compensate for differences in endowment among their children.