A Study On The Investment Of Children's Human Capital In Stepfamily

With the transformation of economy and society,the stepfamily has been increasing.Based on the perspective of family economics,this paper studies the investment of human capital in children of the restructured families.This paper mainly analyzed two aspects of human capital,including the education level and health condition of stepchildren by using the micro-data of CHARLS in 2014 firstly.During the emprically analysis,a regression model was constructed,and the estimation methods includes the ordinary OLS?order Probit and PSM(Propensity Score Matching),and so on.Furthermore,the effect of parental education had on the stepchildren's human capital investment is also been especially studied.In addition,this article also made further exploration about different genders in the human capital investment of children in restructured families.In the sample of reconstructed families,the sub-sample method was used to study the causes of gender differences in the types of recombination families.The empirical results as follows:Firstly,family reorganization has a significant negative impact on the human capital investment of children,which is mainly reflected in education investment.Compared with complete families,the average educational years of stepchildren did reduce by 12.18%-21.01%,and parental higher education could slow down but hardly eliminate this difference.As for the healthy human capital,there is no significant difference between children in the intact families and stepchildren.That's to say,family reorganization does not significantly worsen children's health human capital.Secondly,family reconstruction did have different negative impact on the human capital between boys and girls.The average education level of stepsons and stepdaughters in the recombination family respectly decreased by 14.26% and 7.44% approximately.But the healthy human capital did not have the significant gender difference.Finally,in the further analyses,this paper explores the reason behind the gender differences from the perspective of stepfamily type.The research results show that the stepfather family reduced stepsons' education by 24.21% compared with the stepmother family;However,by contrast,the two stepfamily types did not make any differences for stepgirls.As for the health condition,the results show that there are no significant differences in the impact of the two stepfamily types,so as to the genders.Therefore,when it comes to the education of teenagers,it is necessary to pay more attention to the influence of family structure.