父母工作时间的代际影响:基于城市和流动人口子女认知和非认知能力的分析

The Intergenerational Effect of Parents’ Working Time:An Analysis on Urban and Migrant Children’s Cognitive and Non-cognitive Abilities

本文利用中国家庭追踪调查数据,比较了城市本地人口和迁移人口工作时间对子女认知和非认知能力的影响,研究中区分并识别了收入效应和替代效应。研究发现,对于流动儿童,父母工作时间每天增加1小时可以增加家庭对儿童的教育支出,因此提高了儿童数学成绩0.05个标准差(收入效应),但父母工作时间的增加也减少了陪伴子女的时间,从而使得子女自律能力降低0.015个标准差(替代效应);对于城市本地儿童,本文估计的收入效应为0.05~0.06个标准差,但替代效应为0。研究还发现,流动人口与城市本地人口周均4小时的工作时间差异,可以缩小两类儿童数学成绩差异的20%,但导致了两类儿童自律能力差异的11%。基于以上结论,本文认为,流动家庭除在物质方面增加子女的教育投入外,也不应该忽视对子女的陪伴。对于政策制定者来讲,则需要进一步规范流动人口的工作时间,保障他们及其子女的合法权益。

This paper uses data from China Family Panel Studies to compare the impacts of working hours between migrant and urban workers on their children s cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. We disentangle the income effect from the substitution effect of working hours. Our results show that the increase of one extra working hour of migrant parents per day can promote household s pecuniary investment on children and thus improve children s mathematics achievement by 0.05 standard deviations (income effect). Nevertheless, the increase in working hour also reduces parents accompanying time with children and therefore decreases children self-control ability by 0.015 standard deviations (substitution effect). In comparison, for urban people, the income effect is estimated to be 0.05~0.06 standard deviations, and the substitution effect is around zero. This paper also finds that 4 additional working hours per week for migrant parents can narrow the mathematics achievement gaps between their children and urban children by 20 percent and the extra hour can also contribute to a 11-percent difference in self-control ability between these children. The results suggest that in addition to the pecuniary expenditure on children, parents should spend more time with them. For policymakers, this paper calls for further promulgations to regulate working hours for migrants in order to protect the legal rights of them and their children.