The Schooling of Adult Children and the Smoking Behaviors of Elder Parents in China

The benefits of education on health can spill over from one family member to another, and such an externality contributes to the intergenerational transmission of health inequality. However, most previous studies on intergenerational transmission focus only on the way from parents to children. The upward intergenerational transmission of health from children to parents is increasingly important as the elder parents today will live with their children for a longer period than ever before.

Do parents of well-educated children have a healthier lifestyle? The answer is indefinite in theory. On one side, well-educated children can transfer more economic resources to parents and thus their parents can afford more cigarettes and alcohol. On the other, well-educated children have more health knowledge, which can spill over to their parents. Therefore, whether the schooling of children encourages or discourages parents to quit smoking depends on the relative magnitudes of these two effects.

This study not only explores the correlation but further examine the causality from the schooling of adult children to the smoking behaviors of parents. Using China’s compulsory schooling reform in the mid-1980s as a quasi-experiment, this study examines the causal effects. China's compulsory schooling laws (CSL) officially came into effect in 1986. However, provinces were given some freedom for the implementation time considered on different capability. We exploited temporal and geographic variation generated by the staggered implementation of CSL and used the eligibility of the law as our instrumental variable.

The instrumental variables estimations show that the likelihood of parents’ smoking cessation increases with children’s schooling but the likelihood of parents’ smoking initiation doesn’t. More specifically, parents are 0.5 percent more likely to cease smoking as the schooling of adult child increases by one year. The results further show that such a spillover effect, which is mainly driven by daughters, is stronger among parents with less schooling.