Child Schooling and Housework Time : Evidence from Land Expropriation in Rural China

Land expropriation is a common policy aimed at local development through resource allocation in developing countries. To what extent households can benefit from such local development, directly links to their income change, and whether the change influences children’s outcomes remains unclear. This is of great interest and policy relevance because child development will further affect household economic conditions and local development in the future. By exploiting the temporal and regional variations in the expropriation of agricultural land, this study employs a Difference-in-Differences approach and uses national representative individual-level panel data to examine the effects of expropriation on child schooling and housework time in rural China. Results reveal that land expropriation increases school attendance by 5.2 percentage points, but it comes at the expense of children’s increased housework time on weekends; that is, children substitute for parents’ inadequate unpaid domestic work induced by the increased paid labor market work after the government seizes the land. These findings are robust to alternative controls, heterogeneous treatment effects, and a series of confounding tests. A dilemma that exposed households face is that, on the one hand, land expropriation increases children’s future investment through schooling; on the other hand, to compensate for the financial loss incurred by land expropriation, children currently allocate their time to household work. For policymakers concerned with the consequences of land expropriation in developing countries, an appropriate compensation strategy needs to be provided to cope with this potential dilemma