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

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.