Topic: Arrival of Young Talents: Send-down Movement and Rural Education in China

Speaker: Professor Ziying Fan, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics 

Time: March 23rd, 2018, 10:00–11:30

Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building (College of Economics, JNU)

Abstract:

Understanding human capital spillovers is important for both theory of economic growth and public policy in education. However, empirical evidence is sparse. Convincing identification requires an exogenous relocation of a group of better-educated people. China's "sent-down youth'' (SDY) movement serves as an excellent natural experiment. From 1962 to 1979, the government mandated the temporary resettlement of roughly 18 million urban youth to rural areas. Using a unique county-level data set compiled from over 3,000 local gazetteers, we estimate how rural children's exposure to those better-educated urban youth affects their educational attainment. Our identification strategy builds on two sources of variation. First, counties received different numbers of SDYs during the movement. Second, within the same county, children of different cohorts were exposed differently depending on how their schooling years overlapped with the movement. Empirical results suggest that the arrival of SDYs increases local rural children's education and improve their attitudes towards education. More interestingly, we find evidence that SDYs coming from far away exert greater externalities.