Effects of Home Education on Child Human Capital Development

Abstract

As a result of the execution of the Home Education Promotion Law of the People’s Republic of China and the advancement of the policy to improve the collaboration among schools, families, and the community, the significance of home education for child development has been increasingly emphasized. Drawing on the longitudinal data from the China Education Panel Survey 2013–2015, this study seeks to systematically analyze the relationship between home education and child cognitive and non-cognitive development and reveal the mechanism underlying it. With a sample of 5,893 seventh-grade students selected from schools adopting random class assignment, which was meant to control for endogeneity bias, the researchers created value-added models for child cognitive and non-cognitive skill development and applied causal mediation analysis to explore the pathways through which home education affects child development. Home education was measured in two dimensions: home educational investment (time and money investment) and parenting styles (authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful).