Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

This paper evaluates the effectiveness and the long-term intergenerational impact of China’s Compulsory Schooling Law (CSL) on children’s early childhood development. By exploiting variation in the timing of the introduction of the law across provinces, the difference-in-difference estimates suggest that CSL considerably increased people’s years of schooling and cognitive skills. Using the CSL treatment status as the instrument, I find that children with parents having more years of education tend to speak, count, and get independent at an earlier age. I investigate the possible channels through which parental education can influence children’s early childhood development. The results are in favor of parents’ nurturing style change rather than factors such as the income or the demographic change. These results point to the importance of parents’ quality in determining children’s early-life skill formation.