A new GLO Discussion Paper shows that the Great HE Expansion has exacerbated a large pre-existing urban-rural gap in educational attainment underpinned by the hukou system.
GLO Discussion Paper No. 1092, 2022
Returns to Education in China: Evidence from the Great Higher Education Expansion – Download PDF
by Huang, Bin & Tani, Massimiliano & Wei, Yi & Zhu, Yu
GLO Fellows Massimiliano Tani & Yu Zhu
Author Abstract: China experienced a near 5-fold increase in annual Higher Education (HE) enrolment in the decade starting in 1999. Using the China Household Finance Survey, we show that the Great HE Expansion has exacerbated a large pre-existing urban-rural gap in educational attainment underpinned by the hukou (household registration) system. We instrument the years of schooling with the interaction between urban hukou status during childhood and the timing of the expansion – in essence a difference-in-differences estimator using rural students to control for common time trends. We find that the Great HE raised earnings by 17% for men and 12% for women respectively, allowing for county fixed-effects. These Two Stage Least Squares (2SLS) estimates, which are robust to additional controls for hukou status at birth fully interacted with birth hukou province, can be interpreted as the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) of education on earnings for urban students who enrolled in HE only because of the Great HE Expansion. For the selected subsample of respondents with parental education information, we find that the 2SLS returns for students from more disadvantaged backgrounds are at least as high as their more advantaged counterparts, for both genders.
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RELATED WORK
Higher Education Expansion and the Rise of China in Economics Research” by Matloob Piracha, Massimiliano Tani, Klaus F. Zimmermann & Yu Zhang. China Economic Review 74 (2022) 101813. Published FREE OPEN ACCESS. Free PDF.
Higher Education Expansion and Gender Norms: Evidence from China by Wei Shi. Journal of Population Economics (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-022-00888-z FREE OPEN ACCESS.
GLO DP 1091 Returns to Higher Education – Graduate and Discipline Premiums –Download PDF by Yu Zhu & Lei Xu
JUST PUBLISHED
Vol. 35, Issue 3, July 2022: Journal of Population Economics: 15 articles
https://link.springer.com/journal/148/volumes-and-issues/35-3
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