Migrants in China have made a great contribution to the development of the destination cities,however,their assimilation has always been an issue because of China’s residential registration system.The migration population reached a peak of 253 million in 2014 and went down since 2014.In 2013,National Plan on New Urbanization(2014-2020)declared that the essential value of urbanization in China was people-oriented and we had to gradually settle the former agricultural population who have migrated to the cities.The assimilation of migrants has draw the attention of the country.A lot of work has been done in the assimilation field,the main contribution is to construct the dimensions to measure the assimilation,a consensus is that assimilation should be measured in economic,social,cultural and psychological dimension.Many papers focus on the economic and social dimension and rarely on the cultural and psychological dimension,I focus on the psychological dimension in this paper.Education,which is a very important factor that affect assimilation,is treated as exogenous by scholars,however,I believe there is endogeneity of education.First of all,there exist unobserved variables(such as ability and personal characteristics)that may bring omitted variable problem.The estimate can be biased because education may be related to the error term with omitted variable problem.Second,migrants may have to give up education to migrate for a job,this leads to mutual causality,another kind of endogeneity problem.So the existing research of the effect of education on assimilation can be problematic.This paper use provision of prohibition of child labor in 1991 as an instrument for education(the formal schooling years)with a 2SLS method to research on the causal effect of education on psychological assimilation of migrants in China.I consider rural-urban difference and gender difference in the estimate and find that there is no causal effect of education on assimilation no matter in full sample or sub-samples(rural-urban and male-female).And many restrictive identification tests are adopted in this paper to ensure the validity of the instrument and obtain prudent conclusions,and I also do robustness check.The tests show that except for city belonging of urban subgroup,the prohibition of child labor is a strong instrument and the result is prudent.However,the result can still be argued because of the inadequate samples with college degree and above considering college degree now is an important certificate to find a job.Therefore,I can hardly assert with 100%certainty that there is no causal effect of education on the assimilation of migrants,the result in this paper can be regarded as the impact of education on the assimilation of migrants with low education level(lower than college).The mechanism analysis of the effect of education on the assimilation of migrants shows that generation difference among migrants matters and should be focused in the future research,and job industry,income and spouse’s education have greater effect on urban samples than on rural samples. |