Does a “bad apple” spoil the bunch? The impact of low-achieving students on non-cognitive outcomes

This paper investigates whether the presence of low-achieving classmates affects the noncognitive outcomes of regular students in junior high school. Exploiting random assignments of teachers and students to classes, we show that having classmates who had ever repeated a grade in primary school improves students' mental health and social skills, and the positive peer effects are concentrated among students with a longer duration of peer exposure and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Mechanism analysis reveals that the improved teacher–student and student–student interactions contribute to the enhancement of noncognitive outcomes.     

Do peer effects influence the academic performance of rural students at private migrant schools in China?

This paper examines peer effects on the academic performance of rural migrant students at both the class level and the individual level. The dataset is from a survey of more than 3000 students from all of the 87 migrant schools in Shanghai and Suzhou, China. The two-stage least squares method with an instrumental variable is employed to control for the endogeneity of peer performance variables. We found that peer effects exist among the migrant students at both class and individual levels. A one-point increase in the average of standardized math grade (SMG) of his/her classmates is associated with an increase of 0.5 points in the SMG of an individual (1.01 standard deviation). A one-point increase in a learning companion's SMG can result in an increase of 0.046 points in the student's SMG. The findings reveal that private migrant schools can improve rural migrant students' academic performance by optimizing students' class allocation and building study groups, providing an additional boost to the input-output efficiency of the human-capital education of the children of migrant workers in China, but the effects of these measures are limited.     

Human capital quality and the regional economic growth: Evidence from China

China's economic development has advanced from a high-speed to a high-quality growth stage in recent years. The optimization and upgrading of the economic structure require high-quality human capital to support an innovation-driven economy. In this paper, a general equilibrium model of human capital (Xiang & Yeaple, 2018) is applied to estimate the cognitive and non-cognitive productivities based on Chinese provincial-level macro-data and individual labor's micro-data from 2008 to 2017. The weighted power mean of cognitive and non-cognitive productivities helps calculate the provincial-level human capital quality index (HCQI), which provides a realistic estimate of human capital quality. We find that the improvement of the HCQI leads to convergence in economic growth in China's provinces. HCQI can help explain the differences in economic growth levels in different regions of China. Our study provides a constructive step in understanding cognitive and non-cognitive abilities and HCQI in China, which could help guide education investment policy in China and its provinces.     

When left-behind children become adults and parents: The long-term human capital consequences of parental absence in China

This study examines the long-term effects of childhood left-behind experience on human capital outcomes across two generations in China. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find evidence that adults with left-behind experience in early life have fewer schooling years, lower cognitive test scores, a lower Big Five personality traits index, but a higher internal locus of control. Meanwhile, they are more likely to report underweight, chronic diseases, depression, and lower levels of perceived health and happiness. Our findings of the negative consequences on personality traits and health outcomes are robust to a battery of specification and validity tests. These effects also differ markedly by adults' gender, birth cohort, hukou status, and the characteristics of left-behind experience (i.e., type, timing, and duration). Further, our results also suggest a potential intergenerational transmission mechanism in which human capital loss is induced by one's early-life exposure to parental absence. Specifically, one's childhood left-behind experience is also inversely associated with their offspring's outcomes such as Big Five noncognitive skills, birth weight, and height-for-age z-score. Although adults with left-behind experience are inclined to spend more time with offspring compared with their non-left-behind counterparts, they also tend to have significantly poorer household socioeconomic outcomes and less offspring educational investment.     

Classmates and friends matter! Peer effects on cognitive ability formation

In this paper, we investigate the impact of peer effects on cognitive ability formation at two different levels – class peers and close friends simultaneously. We use random class assignments in the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) to deal with ability sorting and self-selection into classroom when estimating class peer effects. To identify close friend peer effects, we include initial human capital to control for time-invariant unobservables, as stable friendship implies that unobserved preference based on which students make friends is likely to stay unchanged, especially within the one-year frame of the data. We find significant positive peer effects on students' cognitive ability formation at both levels. Peer effects are heterogeneous across student ability. Peer effects work through two channels – peer conformity and peer complementarity. We find both channels generate positive peer effects and jointly determine the size of overall estimated peer effects.     

大学生创新创业认知行为模式研究

大学生创新创业认知行为模式有其特殊性，大学生因年龄和社会阅历等决定其创新创业认知始于感性，要经多维环境持续相互作用才能达到完全认知。从大学生创新创业能力来源出发，对大学生创新创业认知特点进行研究，构建大学生创新创业认知行为宏观、中观、微观三维“耦合”模型，同时探讨大学生对创新创业资源的认知，指出现有研究存在的不足，并对大学生创新创业认知行为模式未来研究进行展望。     

Education,skill training,and lifelong learning in the era of technological revolution: a review

Rapid technological development makes skills depreciate faster than in the past while new technologies generate gaps in workers' skills and call for the acquisition of appropriate skills and lifelong learning. Proper skill mixes for future jobs include strong cognitive skills, basic information and communication technology, and analytical skills, as well as a range of non-cognitive skills such as creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking, and communication. Retraining and reskilling workers are also crucial, particularly as life expectancy increases. All these changes lead to a major rethinking of education and skill training throughout a person's life. This paper reviews the recent studies on human capital and skill formation in the era of rapid technological progress. Findings from these studies, particularly in labour economics, can shed light on new directions for lifelong education policies, for example (1) parental investment in pre-school learning is reflected in highly positive adult outcomes; (2) as far as education inputs are concerned, teacher quality is far more important than additional school resources; and (3) government workforce training programs are largely ineffective as compared to private training, which contribute significantly to worker productivity.     

Do tiger moms raise superior kids? The impact of parenting style on adolescent human capital formation in China

How parenting style influences human capital accumulation is an important yet under-researched topic in the economics literature. Based on the two-wave longitudinal dataset of Chinese Education Panel Survey (CEPS), this study explores the impact of parenting style on adolescents' human capital formation, including cognitive and non-cognitive skills in China. Following the mainstream approach in development psychology, the measurement of parenting style is constructed from two dimensions – demandingness and responsiveness, and further classified into four types: authoritative, authoritarian, permissive and neglectful. We find that both demandingness and responsiveness of parents have positive effects on children's academic performance, while parents' responsiveness play a substantial role in the formation of children's cognitive skills (measured by the standardized cognitive skill tests) as well as socio-emotional skills (measured by mental health, self-confidence, motivation and extraversion). Putting together, the authoritative parenting style characterized by high demandingness and high responsiveness is associated with the best outcome measures among the four parenting types in cultivating children's human capital formation. Moreover, we find that student time-allocation, extracurricular activities and parent-teacher interactions may serve as important channels of the parenting influences, and that there exist moderate interactive effects between fathers' and mothers' influences and between the demandingness and responsiveness of parenting styles.     

Physical activity,leisure-time,cognition and academic grades: Connections and causal effects in Chinese students

Academic achievement and positive leisure activities are traditionally considered significant determinants of economic growth and human capital accumulation. This paper estimates the impact of physical activity on academic outcome and time allocation to 25 different types of leisure activity by Chinese adolescents. We use structural equation models (SEM) to explore the channels of this transmission. Our results suggest that physical exercise not only exerts a positive direct effect on academic outcome but also increases (decreases) students' time devoted to activities that are positively (negatively) correlated with academic outcome. All the effects are statistically significant but modest at the individual level. Our findings are robust to different exercise frequencies and academic outcome indicators based on students' self-assessment, academic scores, and cognitive tests.     

Is care by grandparents or parents better for children's non-cognitive skills? Evidence on locus of control from China

This study investigates the effect of grandparental involvement in childcare on children's locus of control (LOC), which is an important non-cognitive skill that affects children's future development. We use data from the China Family Panel Studies, which is a nationally representative survey, and employ instrumental variables to address the endogeneity of family childcare choice. We find that children with grandparental care have more external LOC than children in the sole care of their parents do; that is, they are more likely to attribute individual success to external factors, such as luck, fate, and family background. This finding is robust to different measures of grandparental involvement in childcare and different model specifications, as well as a minor violation of the exclusion restriction of the instruments. We further examine the potential mechanisms underlying this effect. Grandparents have more external LOC than parents do, which can affect children's LOC through intergenerational transmission of LOC. Their parenting attitudes and styles are also different from parents' in that grandparents take less responsibility for children's academic performance than parents do and are less strict with children. In addition, grandparental care induces adverse effects on children's family environment.     

Class Size Effects on Student Achievement in Norway: Patterns and Explanations

The causal effect of class size on student performance is investigated using a maximum class size rule of 30 students to generate an instrument for actual class size. The data come from lower secondary schools in Norway, and the initial analysis reveals a small negative class size effect. Further investigations show that the effect varies among student subgroups and that the benefits of smaller classes are larger in schools with a high proportion of students who come from intact families. The second section of the paper uses information about the teachers' grading practices and the students' efforts in class to shed additional light on the revealed patterns of class size effects. Class size effects seem to be conditional on student effort.     

How and why do Chinese urban students outperform their rural counterparts?

This paper aims to measure and understand the rural–urban student cognitive ability gap in China. Using the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) 2013/2014 data, we find that the cognitive ability test scores of urban students are approximately 1.41 points (17%) higher than those of rural students, on average. This difference is equivalent to 37 and 41% of the standard deviation of urban and rural students' test scores, respectively. Instead of the raw test score, when the cognitive ability is estimated with the 3-parameter Logistic item response theory model, the rural–urban gap is somewhat reduced. The regression and Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition analyses show that nearly one-half of the rural–urban gap can be accounted for by differences in observed characteristics, especially number of siblings, parental education, and interaction between parents and teachers. We then discuss the policy implications of these results and propose a few potential ways to reduce the rural–urban gap in students' cognitive abilities.     

Who are better teachers? The effects of tenure-track and part-time faculty on student achievement

Using a random assignment of students to mandatory courses in a Chinese university, we estimated the short- and long-term teacher effects on undergraduate academic performance, with a particular focus on part-time instructors. The findings show that both short- and long-term teacher effects existed. Among four groups of instructors, part-time instructors had the largest positive impact on short- and long-term student academic achievement. In addition, associate professors improved students' achievement the most in the long-term, while graduate student instructors raised student test scores the most in the short-term. Assistant professors were the least effective for both short- and long-term outcomes. This study also compared the value-added results to students' subjective evaluations of teaching quality, and found similar patterns except that students rated associate professors higher than part-time instructors.     

北京在校大学生创业认知影响因素研究

为提高在校大学生对创业的认知水平，鼓励大学生创业，缓解我国就业压力，结合社会认知理论及相关文献设计问卷，针对北京市20所大学的508名在校大学生进行问卷调研，提取了影响在校大学生创业认知的重要因素并进行分析，从大学生自身、社会环境和政策角度提出相应对策建议。     

Computer technology in education: Evidence from a pooled study of computer assisted learning programs among rural students in China

There is a great degree of heterogeneity among the studies that investigate whether computer technologies improve education and how students benefit from them – if at all. The overall goal of this study is to assess the effectiveness of computing technologies to raise educational performance and non-cognitive outcomes and identify what program components are most effective in doing so. To achieve this aim we pool the data sets of five separate studies about computer technology programs that include observations of 16,856 students from 171 primary schools across three provinces in China. We find that overall computing technologies have positive and significant impacts on student academic achievement in both math and in Chinese. The programs are found to be more effective if they are implemented out-of-school, avoiding what appear to be substitution effects when programs are run during school. The programs also have heterogeneous effects by gender. Specifically, boys gain more than girls in Chinese. We did not find heterogeneous effects by student initial achievement levels. We also found that the programs that help students learn math—but not Chinese—have positive impacts on student self-efficacy.     

The education of migrant children in China's urban public elementary schools: Evidence from Shanghai

The education of migrant children critically determines the level of human capital of China's future labor force. The majority of migrant children in Chinese cities now study in public schools. This paper uses self-collected data in Shanghai in 2010 and 2012 to evaluate the performance of migrant students in public elementary schools. We find that across schools, migrant students with better family background enter into schools with higher quality. Within the same schools, migrant students perform as well as their local counterparts, in both cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions. Our results suggest that there is no evidence of within-school discrimination against migrant students within public schools, and the key to improving their education is access to better schools.     

Effects of class-size reduction on cognitive and non-cognitive skills

We estimate the effects of class-size reduction by exploiting exogenous variation caused by Maimonides’ rule, which requires that the maximum class size is 40 students and that classes be split into two when 41 students are enrolled. Our data cover all fourth to ninth graders in 1064 public schools in an anonymous prefecture of Japan for three years. We find that the effects of class-size reduction on academic test scores are statistically and/or economically insignificant when school fixed effects are controlled. We find no evidence that small class size improves non-cognitive skills.     

Post‐Injury Work Outcomes Revisited

We use data for Ontario workers with permanent impairments resulting from work‐related injuries to investigate the complex relationships among post‐injury work outcomes: wages, accommodations, returning to the same or different employer, and duration of work absence. We argue the different aspects of post‐injury work experience may be jointly determined, making post‐injury job characteristics endogenous in a duration model. To explore the endogeneity issues we instrument post‐injury job variables from first‐stage equations and compare results from this “informed” model to a “naive” model that treats the variables as exogenous. We find that returning to one's pre‐injury employer is associated with more favorable post‐injury work outcomes, including higher wages, greater likelihood of job accommodations, and shorter durations of work absence relative to workers who change employers. We also find substantial differences between the naive and informed models, with accommodations having the predicted negative effect on duration only after we control for endogeneity.     

The long-term effects of automatic grade promotion on child development

Grade retention is a common practice in many countries despite the fact that the evidence for its influence on child development is mixed. In 2006, China introduced a new rule that explicitly prohibited grade repetition during the compulsory education period. Exploiting the staggered introduction of this policy across provinces and applying a flexible difference-in-differences strategy, we analyze the causal effects of the reform on various student outcomes, including school completion and cognitive skills, mental health and self-confidence in early adulthood. The results indicate that automatic grade promotion hurts students' educational development, especially for boys and for children with less-educated mothers. On the other hand, however, the reform indeed improved mental health, as noted by the proponents of social promotion. More importantly, we find that all the policy impacts are concentrated solely among students exposed to the reform in an early grade, particularly 1st-3rd grade. The results further indicate that removing the “threat” of grade retention results in a decrease in study time in the long run, which we interpret as a potential mechanism.     

Tailored Regulation: Will Voluntary Site-Specific Environmental Performance Standards Improve Welfare?

Increasingly popular tailored regulation (TR) initiatives like the Environmental Protection Agency's Project XL allow industrial facilities to voluntarily substitute site-specific environmental performance standards for inefficient command-and-control regulations. TR can significantly reduce participants' costs of complying with environmental regulations, but in doing so it can also give these participants a competitive advantage. Here we develop an analytical model to show that TR can have adverse welfare effects when if enables relatively inefficient firms in oligopolistic markets to “steal” market share from more efficient firms, and we characterize the regulatory policies that give rise to such outcomes. We also show that regulators' efforts to diffuse the benefits of site-specific agreements among nonparticipating firms dampen incentives to participate in TR.