The role of opportunity versus effort in shaping long-term well-being in China

ABSTRACT

Whether children who inherit social advantages or those who exhibit motivated hard work are more likely to attain superior well-being over time remains a critical question, yet has received little empirical examination. This paper aims to provide new evidence from China on this issue by deploying a natural experiment research design. The empirical analysis explores the link between early-life experiences shaped by parental family background and children’s long-term well-being outcome. Using household survey data from China, we find that children born with social advantages tend to complete more years of education in rural areas but fewer years in urban areas compared to their counterparts. Our results are robust to changing the cohort selection, outcome variables, and sources of the analytical sample.

KEYWORDS:

• Opportunity
• effort
• family background
• long-term well-being

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I24
• J24
• J62
• J78

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the editor Dierk Herzer and two anonymous referees for their valuable comments and suggestions. All remaining errors belong to the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Around 1949, when the People’s Republic of China was established, the government initiated land reform policies that redistributed houses, land, and wealth equally among households through social redistribution processes. Simultaneously, the government assigned inheritable class labels to each household based on their pre-liberation status, which remained unchanged throughout the planned economy era.

² It should be noted that we only generate income variables for the urban sample. This is due to the reason that the CHIP data does not account for income from self-production and self-marketing in agriculture for rural areas. This makes it infeasible to accurately acquire total income figures for rural areas.

Additional information

Funding

This work was carried out with the aid of the Key Research Base Project of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Universities of Hubei Province. The start-up funding for scientific research from Wuhan Polytechnic University [2022RZ004] is also gratefully acknowledged.