Recently, the paper entitled "Understanding the Effect of Adult Children’s Education on Older Parents’ Subjective Well-being: Evidence from China," co-authored by Ma Yuanyuan, a researcher at the Center for International Cooperation and Disciplinary Innovation of Income Distribution and Public Finance under the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, together with Dong Shoukang (from Fudan University) and Zhang Yi (from Central University of Finance and Economics), was officially published in the prestigious international journal Journal of Happiness Studies. The journal is a world-renowned SSCI journal in social sciences, enjoying extensive academic influence within the international community.
Highlights
Against the backdrop of a rapidly aging population, subjective well-being is not only a core indicator for measuring individual quality of life, but also a crucial dimension for assessing the effectiveness of social development. This paper investigates the impact of adult children's educational attainment on the life satisfaction of older parents in China, with particular emphasis on the underlying mechanisms and gender heterogeneity. Drawing on data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, and using exogenous differences in the impact of China's compulsory education law across children's birth cohorts to construct instrumental variables, the research finds that each additional year of children's education increases parents' life satisfaction by an average of 3%. Compared to daughters, sons' education levels have a more significant effect on their parents' life satisfaction. The mechanism analysis indicates that important pathways include the reduction in children's personal issues, stronger intergenerational support, improved parent-child relationships, and enhanced parental outlook on the future. Further analysis reveals that the educational attainment of children does not significantly improve their parents' depression levels. By adopting the perspectives of parents' altruistic motivation and intergenerational support for their children, this study offers empirical evidence on how adult children's educational attainment affects the subjective well-being of older parents, and provides valuable policy insights for comprehensively assessing the intergenerational spillover effects of education expansion policies.
About the Author
Ma Yuanyuan is a professor and doctoral advisor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (ZUEL) and a researcher at the Center for International Cooperation and Disciplinary Innovation of Income Distribution and Public Finance supported by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. She has been recognized as a top young professional in Hubei Province and as a Young Scholar of the Wenlan Scholar Program. Her main research areas include health economics, population economics, and public economics. She has published more than 20 papers in prestigious domestic and international journals, including Demography, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Journal of Happiness Studies, Health Economics, World Development, The Journal of World Economy, and Finance & Trade Economics. She has led and participated in several projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Social Science Fund of China. Professor Ma has received the second prize for the Hubei Provincial Social Science Outstanding Achievement Award, the Outstanding Achievement Award in Philosophy and Social Sciences of Higher Education Institutions in Hubei Province, and the first prize for the Hubei Provincial Population Science Award, among other honors. She serves as a member of the Economic Professional Committee of the Hubei Provincial Committee of the China Association for Promoting Democracy and a council member of the China Association of Labor Economics. Her international engagements include serving as a teaching evaluation expert at University College Dublin. Furthermore, she is a peer reviewer for the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Social Science Fund of China. She also holds the position of Associate Editor for the SSCI-indexed journal Economics and Human Biology.