Congratulations to our professors whose co-authored papers were recently accepted by the Journal of Comparative Economics!

The Effect of Primary School Type on the High School Opportunities of Migrant Children in China

By our Dean and Professor Shuaizhang Feng and Assistant Professor Yujie Han (Co-author: Yuanyuan Chen)

Abstract

Using longitudinal data collected from China, this paper studies how primary school type affects migrant children's high school opportunities. We use parental residence prior to a policy change in Shanghai as an instrument for primary school type, and find that migrant children who attended private primary schools are 10% less likely to enter high schools without retention than their counterparts who attended public primary schools. We show that both institutional barriers and learning at the primary school stage affect students' probability of entering high school and whether they go to regular or vocational high schools.

Estimating Returns to Education in Urban China: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Schooling Reform

By our Associate Professor Yi Chen (Co-authors: Sheng Jiang, Li-An Zhou).

Abstract

Whereas there is a large literature on estimating returns to education in China, few studies have attempted to address the endogeneity of schooling choices. We explore the arguably exogenous changes in the duration of secondary education as the instrumental variable to identify the causal effect of years of schooling in urban China. The schooling years in most middle schools were reduced from three years to two years during the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese government gradually restored the middle school education years from two years to three years after 1978. An important feature of these policy changes is their large geographic variations. From local gazetteers, we find out the exact years when education years were reduced from three to two and when they were restored from two to three. Using the exogenous variation in schooling reform, we estimate that the returns to education are 12.7% for both monthly wage and disposable income.