Professor Lu Yuanping, Executive Dean of IIDPF, and his co-authors have published their latest research online in the internationally renowned Journal of Happiness Studies, entitled Education Fever in China: Children's Academic Performance and Parents' Life Satisfaction. Journal of Happiness Studies is a cross-disciplinary journal that studies subjective well-being (involving economics, sociology, psychology, etc.) with an impact factor of 2.511 in 2018.
The study investigates the impact of children's academic performance on parents' life satisfaction by exploring the social phenomenon of Chinese parents' extremely high expectations of their children's academic performance. The study found that a one-unit rise in a child's class rank was associated with a 3.4 percentage point increase in their parent's life satisfaction score. Meanwhile, the above phenomenon is mainly found in middle-income, urban and one-child families. The study also found that excessive parental investment in education has a negative impact on their life satisfaction. Findings provide insights into Chinese parents' enthusiasm for their children's education from an economics of happiness perspective, and offer important insights for Chinese education policy makers.
Professor Lu Yuanping is a full-time researcher at IIDPF, whose main research areas are: income distribution, social security policy evaluation, fiscal economics and the economics of happiness. Prof. Lu's research achievements have been published in authoritative journals such as China Economic Quarterly, Journal of Financial Research, Economic Perspectives, Finance & Trade Economics and Public Finance Research. Professor Lu chaired a number of national and provincial level projects, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education, and the Special and First Class Grants of China Postdoctoral Science Foundation. This publication is Prof. Lu's second SSCI journal paper of 2020, the first published on The Social Science Journal in March.