A Study On Non-Pecuniary Intergenerational Effects Of Education Based On The Relationship Between Maternal Education And Child Health

Traditional economic theories regarded education as an investment. Those who were educated gained pecuniary returns, which provided guard for future consumption, thus improving personal wellfare and keeping a nation's sustainable development. Actually, education has not only pecuniary returns, but also non-pecuniary effects. This paper focuses on non-pecuniary intergenerational effects of education from the perspective of the relationship between maternal education and child health. It is meaningful to deeply understand the true value of education and can give support to establishment and implement of relative policies.This paper consideres the following issues:(1) analysing some basic facts of china's female education and child health by using macro data; (2) explaining the possible machnisms of mother's education on child health; (3) constructing theoretical framework and the empirical model to estimate the effects of maternal education on child health, followed by value estimation of maternal education; (4) measuring the production efficiencies of maternal education on child health, and analysing the influential factors.With theoretical and empirical methods, this study gets the main conclusions:First, the education levels of china's women have been greatly increased, but still fallen behind men's. There are differences in women's education between urban and rural as well as regions. The status of child health has been improved, but stll has malnutrition. Children's body development in urban has advantage compared with that in rural. The health of children in different provinces appears different.Second, investment in women's education can produce significantly intergenerational effects. The higher the mother's education level, the higher is mother's ability to take care of children, thus making child status in health better. Education improves mother's ability to have healthier children through the possible machnisms: knowledge capital, social capital, physical capital, bargaining position and freedom to choic. Additionally, education can improve their effeciencis of resource allocation and usage.Third, from theoretical framework, this paper shows that the true value of maternal education to some degree is substitution of her children's care time. The empirical study shows that mother's education in different level have significately different effects on child health, suggesting the non-linear relationship between them. The returns of mothers with high-school education are the biggest for child health producing, tertiary education the second, compulsory education the third. The value estimation of maternal education appears that the value of mothers with higher-shool education and above is more than 1,000 yuan, about two times of that of mothers with only compulsory education.Forth, regarding family health system as decision making unit of child health production, this paper uses BBC model of DEA method to measure the efficiencies of maternal education on child health production. The result shows that the average efficiency of mathernal education is low, which means existing efficiency lost. The anlysis on influential factors is done latter and finds that the differences in region, location (urban or rural) and family structure (e.g. number of mother's sisters) are all statistically significant.The innovations of this paper can be summarized as follows:First, the study provides a new perspective for theories of education returns. This paper considers non-pecuniary intergenerational effects of maternal education on child health, offering new theoretical support for the generationally passing-on returns of education.Second, it explores to analyse the issue that different effects can exist in the same eduation level. This paper discusses the effects of mothers with same education level but in different grades on child health, and uses family survey data to do the empirical study. The results will be more objective and reseanable.Third, the proposed suggestions about education equality, eduation quality and adult eduation programs have strong application values.