家庭规模、资源约束与子女教育分布——基于CFPS的实证研究

Family Size and Children's Educational Distribution under Credit Constraints:Empirical Evidence from CFPS

"数量-质量权衡"理论认为,在资源约束下,家庭规模越大,子女平均受教育水平越低,然而家庭规模对子女教育分布的影响没有得到足够的关注。当多子女家庭面临强资源约束时,父母可能让部分子女辍学打工,补贴其他子女,反而会提高部分子女的受教育水平。本文建立一个包含同胞间转移支付的家庭教育投资决策模型,与使用CFPS数据实证研究的结果一致地表明:强资源约束下,家庭规模越大,子女中最高教育水平越高;出生次序、同胞中女性比例与子女教育水平正相关。随着家庭资源约束程度降低,以上效应逐渐减小。本文研究结论为提高国民受教育水平和教育机会均等化的政策提供了理论支持。

“ Quantity - Quality Trade - off” theory suggests that the bigger the family size,the lower theaverage education level of the children. However, traditional theories pay little attention to the impact of family size on the children’ educational distribution. Under strong credit constraints in the family with mor^ than one child,some children may drop out of school and work to subsidize for the rest of the children ’ education, which can affect their children s education distribution. Based on a family education making theory model and the empirical results using CFPS,this paper suggests that under the strongest familycredit constraint,family size has positive impact on the highest education level of siblings. And the child’ sbirth order and the proportion of girls in siblings have positive effect on child5 s educationThe three positive effects above are reducing along with the weakening of family credit constraint. The conclu-sions provide theoretical support for the policies of improving the national education level and education opportunity equalization.