Health shocks and children's school attainments in rural China

Using a long panel dataset of Chinese farm households covering the period of 1987–2002, this paper studies how major health shocks happening to household adults affect children's school attainments. We find that primary school-age children are the most vulnerable to health shocks, with their chances to enter middle school dropping by 9.9 percentage points when a prime-age adult in their families has a major illness. Our robustness regressions that try to take care of the composition bias in illness reports find larger effects with the upper bound being 16.1 percentage points. We also find that the effects of health shocks vary by gender and birth order. However, middle school-age children are not affected by family health shocks.