Baryshnikova, Nadezhda V.Mahuteau, StephaneShi, Ruyi2025-07-222025-07-222025https://hdl.handle.net/2440/146220This thesis includes three independent chapters that explore how internal migration, education, and family structure affect human capital outcomes and intergenerational support in Indonesia and China. The first chapter examines the causal impact of internal migration on formal employment in Indonesia using longitudinal household survey data from the Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS). We use rainfall as an instrumental variable for migration to address the endogeneity caused by reverse causality. Our empirical results show that, in general, internal migration is expected to increase the chance of having a formal job by approximately 16 percentage points. This impact is heterogeneous across gender and levels of education. The magnitude of this impact rises to around 25 percentage points for males but drops to only 7 percentage points for females. We also find migration only has a significant impact on individuals with senior high school education or higher, with the estimated impact being roughly 20 percentage points. The second chapter examines the heterogeneous effect of adult children’s education on elderly parents’ mental health in China. We employ a quantile regression model to examine how the impact of children’s education on parents’ mental health varies across different levels of mental health status. To address the endogeneity of education, we use children’s exposure to the compulsory schooling law as an instrument. Our results from the instrumental variable quantile estimation reveal that children’s education has no effect on parents with mild to moderate mental health issues (below the 0.7 quantile) but has a positive and significant impact on those with severe issues (at the 0.7 quantile and above). Our split-sample and comparative analyses indicate that the impact varies according to children’s gender, parental residency type, children’s educational ranking within the household, and children’s birth order. The third chapter provides rich new evidence on China’s evolving birth order effects on education. We use family-by-wave fixed effects to explore within-family variations in birth order across siblings. A positive birth order effect on education is observed among older generations (born before 1967), while the birth order effect reverses to negative among younger generations (born after 1978). For the positive effect, school dropout among older siblings is the primary driver, whereas child labour laws and resource dilution are the key factors for the negative effect. Brothers have consistently attained higher levels of education than sisters, but this gap has narrowed over time. In addition, differences in old-age support levels are negligible both among siblings and between brothers and sisters. This implies that children who are expected to provide more old-age support to their parents in return for the favours they received during childhood—as suggested by the birth order effect—do not, in fact, offer more support. The altruistic motive emerges as a potential reason why siblings, as well as brothers and sisters, provide equal levels of old-age support to their parents. Furthermore, we find no evidence that in-kind support and monetary support offset or reinforce each other, suggesting that they function neither as substitutes nor complements. Our results offer a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between birth order, human capital investment, and intergenerational support in the face of China’s rapid economic transition. The contribution of this thesis is to provide micro-level evidence on enhancing human capital development. Specifically, the first chapter fills a gap in the literature by examining how internal migration affects individual labour market outcomes in Indonesia. The second chapter is the first to explore the heterogeneous effects of children’s education on parents’ mental health in China. The third chapter offers new and detailed evidence on how birth order effects have evolved during China’s period of rapid economic transformation. The policy implications of the thesis include easing regional mobility restrictions to improve employment opportunities, as well as increasing educational investment and reducing within-family disparities to support parental mental health and promote children’s long-term development.enInternal migrationFormal employmentRainfallInstrumental variableIndonesiaEducationMental healthQuantile regressionBirth orderOld-age supportChinaThesis