Quantity-Quality and the One Child Policy: The Only-Child Disadvantage in School Enrollment in Rural China

Many believe that increasing the quantity of children will lead to a decrease in their quality. This paper exploits plausibly exogenous changes in family size caused by relax- actions in China's One Child Policy to estimate the causal effect of family size on school enrollment of the …first child. The results show that for one-child families, an additional child signi…ficantly increased school enrollment of …first-born children by approximately 16 percentage-points. The effect is larger for households where the children are of the same sex, which is consistent with the existence of economies of scale in schooling costs.[Working Paper No. 228]