Delayed Marriage in China: An Analysis of Education's Impact on Marriage Open Access

Abstract

Basing on the 2010 cross-sectional dataset from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), which collects individual-level data spanning 25 provinces across the country, I conduct a research to estimate the impact of women's education on their marriage status and age at first marriage in the current Chinese society. Considering the gender inequality in Chinese society, and the socioeconomic differences between rural and urban China, the analysis is separated for women and men, and urban and rural areas for better comparisons and discussions. I first use Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression models with dependent variables as marriage status in 2010, "ever married" by 2010, and age at first marriage, and each of the dependent variables is analyzed under four conditions: rural women, urban women, rural men, and urban men. The regression results demonstrate that women's education in both rural and urban China tends to delay their first marriages and decrease their marriage rates, contrary to the positive effect on men's marriage. In the second stage, the two-stage least square (2sls) regression models with quarter of birth as the instrumental variable for year of schooling is applied to investigate the causality between education and marriage status. Although the influence of education on marriage for both genders decreases in 2sls regression results, their correlation cannot be fully denied considering the small values of R-squared. This suggests there might be some socioeconomic factors missing from the models. However, these factors are hard to be quantifiable in terms of economic or statistical contexts. For this reason, more research with an interdisciplinary background including psychology, sociology, and gender studies needs to be conducted to further investigate the relationship between education and marriage.

Table of Contents

I. INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................................... 1

II. LITERATURE REVIEW............................................................................................................ 3

III. DATA & METHODOLOGY...................................................................................................... 10

Data................................................................................................................................. 10

Methods............................................................................................................................ 14

IV. RESULTS........................................................................................................................... 17

V. DISCUSSION...................................................................................................................... 22

REFERENCES........................................................................................................................... 26

Table 1: OLS regression - summary statistics of variables ............................................................. 28

Table 2: OLS regression - marriage status in 2010 as the dependent variable................................... 29

Table 3: OLS regression - "ever married" by 2010 as the dependent variable.................................... 30

Table 4: OLS regression - age at first marriage as the dependent variable........................................ 31

Table 5: 2sls regression............................................................................................................. 32

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Economics
Degree	BS
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Economics, Theory Sociology, Theory and Methods
Keyword	marriage education china
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Francis-Tan, Andrew, Emory University
Committee Members	Bullock, Julia, Emory University Yue, Zhanwei , Emory University

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