Marry up, rise up: the spillover effect of marrying up on students’ cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes

Patterns of marital matching play a central role in shaping social mobility and the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Using data from a nationally representative dataset of randomly assigned junior high school classes in China, this study examines how peers’ parental hypergamy influences students’ outcomes. We find that higher parental hypergamy rates significantly increase students’ cognitive outcomes and non-cognitive skills.

These effects are particularly pronounced among students from less-rich families and students with rural hukou. Mechanisms driving these outcomes include increased parental involvement and student motivation, better classroom climates and higher teacher attention. Our findings contribute new evidence on how peer socio-economic backgrounds shape the formation of human capital across generations.

The Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics, Xiamen University, Amoy, China School of Economics, Nanjing University of Finance & Economics, Nanjing, China The authors declare no competing interests. Informed consent was obtained from all participants and/or their legal guardians (where participants were minors) by the original investigators of the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) prior to the primary data collection. For this secondary analysis, the requirement for obtaining additional informed consent was waived due to the de-identified and publicly accessible nature of the dataset.

This study involves the secondary analysis of a publicly available, de-identified dataset, the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS). As the research does not involve direct interaction with human participants or the use of identifiable private information, it was exempt from requiring an additional ethical review by an institutional review board. The primary data collection for the CEPS was approved by the ethical committee of the National Survey Research Center at Renmin University of China.

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