The impact of family planning policy on the intergenerational transmission of education: evidence from China’s one-child policy

This paper examines the effect of China’s One-Child Policy (OCP) on intergenerational transmission of education (ITE) by exploiting its staggered rollout across provinces as a quasi-natural experiment. We find that exposure to the OCP significantly increased the persistence of education across generations, thereby reducing intergenerational mobility. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that this effect is driven primarily by the Han ethnic group—the policy’s primary target—whereas no significant change is observed among exempt ethnic minorities. Furthermore, we show that stricter local enforcement of the policy led to a stronger parent-child education correlation. We rationalize these findings with a quantity-quality trade‑off model, where the exogenous fertility constraint raises per-child educational investment among better-educated parents. This study establishes that population policies can have profound and unintended consequences for the intergenerational transmission of advantage, extending inequality research to family planning and offering a framework for assessing the social equity implications of future demographic interventions.