Evaluating remedial education in elementary schools: Administrative data from a municipality in Japan

In this study, we examine the effect of a remedial education program in language arts and mathematics for third- and fourth-grade students with low previous academic performance. Utilizing a unique panel data set constructed from the administrative data of public elementary schools in Adachi ward in Japan, we estimate the impact of remedial program participation on the subsequent test scores in Japanese language arts and mathematics. This paper utilizes the variations in placement policies of schools as an instrument to identify the effect of the remedial education program, controlling for selection biases. Our estimation results indicate that the remedial education programs had positive effects on test scores of Japanese language arts by 0.13 of a standard deviation, while no statistically significant effect was found for mathematics test scores. The results suggest that the participants increased awareness of the importance of study practices and hours of study as well.     

Migrants and urban wage: Evidence from China's internal migration

Using China's 2005 1% population survey, this paper examines the wage impact on urban workers of rural to urban migration. We find that, on average, migrants increase the wages of urban workers, with the effect being magnified for more skilled urban workers. This suggests that migrants with skills similar to those of urban workers may complement them. We explore the possible channels of these effects. From the supply perspective, we find that migration inflows accelerate the occupational upgrading of urban workers, especially for low- and medium-skilled workers. From a demand perspective, as the share of migrants in the urban labor force increases, the number and output of industrial firms also increase, and firms become more reliant on low-skilled workers. The more migrants in a city, the greater the available employees for industrial firms, particularly for low-skilled employees. However, the effects on high-skilled firms are much smaller or insignificant. In addition, we find that migrants have little impact on firms' capital-labor and capital-output ratios. This suggests that firms can expand through capital adjustments to absorb inexpensive migrants, which alleviates the possible negative impact of migrants on the urban labor market.     

School starting age and academic achievement: Evidence from China's junior high schools

This paper examines the effect of school starting age on the academic achievement of junior high school students using the newly available data from the China Education Panel Survey. Regression discontinuity design estimation based on an exogenous entrance cutoff date indicates that a one-year delay is associated with a 0.303 decrease in standard deviations of cognitive scores. However, this negative effect is caused by human capital accumulation prior to primary school entry.     

Decomposing wage differentials between migrant workers and urban workers in urban China's labor markets

This paper looks at wage discrimination faced by China's rural–urban migrants. Using data from the China Urban Labour Survey, it uses standard wage decomposition techniques to measure the extent wage gaps between migrants and locals are attributable to migration. Because the survey covers five cities, the results allow for an investigation regarding how much variation in discrimination there is. Unlike previous studies of wage discrimination in China, this research includes a more full measure of remuneration by including non-financial benefits as well as bonuses earned. The results suggest that migrants still face a significant amount of discrimination, but that this varies a lot between cities.     

Effects of cohort size on college premium: Evidence from China's higher education expansion

In this paper, we document the lesser-known heterogeneous trends of college/non-college earnings premium across age groups from 1995 to 2013 in China. Specifically, the college premium in 2013 for the younger group (age 25–34) was about 30 percentage points, similar to the level in 1995, while the college premium in 2013 for the older group (age 45–54) increased to 50 percentage points, nearly double that of 1995. To attribute these divergent trends of the college premium to the changes in the relative size of college workers, we use the model by Card and Lemieux (2001), which incorporates imperfect substitution between similarly educated workers in different age cohorts. Due to the distinctions of these trends in China, our identification is free of the overestimation issue that the existing studies suffer. Our results are similar to those in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Japan. Holding the age cohort and survey year constant, a one unit increase in log relative size of college workers is associated with about 10 percentage points decrease in college/non-college premium and about 18 percentage points decrease in college/high school premium. We further find that the negative effect is much more substantial among the new entrants (age 25–29) than experienced workers (age 30–54). By this pattern, we demonstrate that the new labor market entrants are more sensitive to their own cohort size and argue that the confounding ability composition effect should not be a serious issue.     

The effects of China's higher education expansion on urban and rural intergenerational mobility

This study examines the heterogeneous effect of higher education on intergenerational mobility of rural and urban residents before and after China's higher education expansion (CHEE). Drawing on data from seven waves of the China General Social Survey (CGSS), we find that, although the overall effect of higher education decreases on alleviating intergenerational persistence after CHEE, undergraduate or postgraduate education can still significantly promote rural intergenerational mobility in terms of occupational-socioeconomic status. However, higher education appears to have changed from assisting social mobility to advancing intergenerational persistence in urban areas after CHEE. The propensity score matching method was used to mitigate sample selection bias, and all the findings were validated by several robustness checks, including placebo and Oster's (2019) omitted-variable tests.     

The effect of education expansion on intergenerational transmission of education: Evidence from China

More than 70 million people have attained a tertiary education due to China's higher education expansion (CHEE). Using data from the Chinese Household Income Project Survey, we examine how dose education expansion have an effect on the intergenerational transmission of education (ITE) by using the exogenous surge brought by CHEE. Our finding is that, after carefully addressing the interference induced by the Compulsory Education Laws and the selection bias caused by intergenerational co-residence, CHEE reduces ITE when educational achievement is measured by schooling years. However, when taking the quality of higher education into account, we find that CHEE does not have a significant effect on ITE, which suggests that the intergenerational inequality in higher education remains. Moreover, we identify the mechanism that the inequality in the quality of high school education extends to tertiary education to explains our findings. To account for the mixed findings in previous literatures, we further propose a general framework for understanding the effect of education expansion on ITE.     

Do education vouchers prevent dropout at private high schools? Evidence from Japanese policy changes

Although education voucher programs for students attending private high schools have existed in Japan for decades, to date there have been no studies that examine their effectiveness. In this study, we estimate the programs’ preventative effect on dropout by using school-track level (academic or vocational) panel data covering all high schools in northern Japan. Prefectural governments have faced increasing dropout rates stemming from financial difficulties, and expanded the scope and amount of their private high school tuition support programs since the late 1990s. We use this variation to identify the effect of tuition support on students’ dropout decisions, controlling for initial academic ability of students entering the schools and unobservable school-track effects. We also apply the instrumental variable method to account for the possible endogeneity of policy changes. Our results suggest that increasing tuition support is particularly effective in preventing the dropout of private high school students on nonacademic tracks.     

Big BRICs,weak foundations: The beginning of public elementary education in Brazil,Russia, India,and China

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50% of the world's population in 1910, but remarkably few of their citizens attended any school by the early 20th century. We present new, comparable data on school inputs and outputs for BRIC drawn from contemporary surveys and government documents. Recent studies emphasize the importance of political decentralization, and relatively broad political voice for the early spread of public primary education in developed economies. We identify the former and the lack of the latter to be important in the context of BRIC, but we also outline how other factors such as factor endowments, colonialism, serfdom, and, especially, the characteristics of the political and economic elite help explain the low achievement levels of these four countries and the incredible amount of heterogeneity within each of them.     

The quantity of education and preference for sons: Evidence from Taiwan's compulsory education reform

This paper attempts to identify the causal effect of parental education on the male ratio at birth. To deal with the endogeneity of parental education, we exploit Taiwan's educational reform in 1968 making education compulsory up to the ninth grade. Based on a uniquely large and detailed administrative data set from Taiwan, our results show that the average education level of mothers is positively related to the male ratio at birth, both in the case of high-parity births and when mothers are at least 30 years old.     

The costs and benefits of government control: Evidence from China's collectively-owned enterprises

China's collectively-owned enterprises are unconventional, as they are nominally owned by those people residing in the areas where the enterprises are located but effectively controlled by the local governments. This study finds that collectively-owned enterprises, once being privatized, encounter an increase in the cost of goods sold to sales ratio but manage to lower down the managerial expenses to sales ratio. The findings imply that local government officials may help collectively-owned enterprises gain access to cheaper production inputs, but they may use those enterprises to pursue private benefits, thereby shedding lights on the costs and benefits of government control.     

研发投入对企业绩效的影响——来自2009—2011年中国上市公司的实证证据

论文以2009-2011年中国上市公司为研究样本,从企业盈利能力和发展能力两个方面分析了企业的研发活动对企业绩效的影响。研究发现：（1）我国各行业研发投入普遍不足;（2）企业的研发活动与企业进行研发的当年及随后两年的绩效显著负相关,特别是对企业的盈利能力影响更明显。     

Returns to education in China: Evidence from the great higher education expansion

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.     

The heterogeneous effects of employment-based pension policies on employment: Evidence from urban China

Pension contributions are usually non-trivial labor costs for firms in formal sectors. This paper aims to examine the heterogeneous effects of employer pension contribution rates on employment by exploiting temporal and spatial variations in the statutory pension contribution rates of the Basic Old-Age Insurance (BOAI) in urban China. We refer to the China’s Urban Household Survey (UHS) (2002–2009), in order to demonstrate that increasing the employer statutory pension contribution rates leads to a decrease in employment in state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and an increase in employment in private enterprises. Overall, the pension contribution rates for employers has no obvious effects on total employment. Our results highlight that private sector employment can be an important mechanism to absorb displaced workers produced by labor market policies.     

Housing wealth changes and entrepreneurship: Evidence from urban China

This paper studies the impact of household-level housing wealth changes on entrepreneurship in urban China. Exploiting the 2011–2015 China Household Finance Survey, we control for lagged proxies for wealth, city-by-year fixed effects, and other household attributes and directly estimate the magnitude of homeowner's response to housing capital gains net of home maintenance and upgrading expenditures. We also instrument for housing wealth changes with structural breaks in city housing price trend. We find that a 10,000 RMB increase in housing wealth increases the propensity of a household becoming a business owner by about 0.7 percentage points in IV estimation. In addition, we provide new evidence for underlying channels that housing capital gains alleviate household credit constraints, reduce risk aversion and increase awareness of financial information.     

进口中间品质量与企业生产率:基于中国制造业企业的研究

文章基于2000-2006年中国工业企业数据和海关贸易数据,测算了进口中间品质量和企业全要素生产率,并深入分析了进口中间品产品质量对中国制造业企业全要素生产率的影响。多种计量方法的分析结果表明:进口中间品产品质量显著促进了企业生产率的提升。异质性分析的结果表明,进口中间品产品质量对加工贸易企业、外资企业的生产率提升作用显著大于其他贸易方式和所有制类型的企业;不管企业是从非OECD国家进口,还是从OECD国家进口,中间品产品质量的提升都可促进企业生产率的提高;相比高质量的进口中间品,低质量的进口中间品不能提高企业的生产率。进一步的分位数回归结果表明,相比高生产率企业,低生产率企业能够从进口中间品质量中获益更多,全面提高进口中间品质量可以自动地缩小企业间生产率水平的差距。     

The long-run effects of housing location on travel behavior: Evidence from China's housing reform

Many cities in developing countries are experiencing rapid urbanization along with deteriorating traffic congestion and air quality, so it is important to understand what affects travel demand in developing countries. In this paper, we study how housing location affects travel behavior in Beijing, a city in a developing country. We use subsidized housing as a source of variation for housing location—individuals in subsidized housing live much closer to the city center than individuals in the control group. We exploit a change in the eligibility for subsidized housing generated by China's housing reforms to address the potential endogeneity of subsidized housing. We find that subsidized housing substantially reduces distances traveled for commuting and discretionary trips and that subsidized individuals are less likely to drive but have similar rates of automobile ownership. The results suggest that housing location can have long-lasting effects on travel behavior and automobile use in a developing country. We discuss policy implications of these findings.     

The effect of border controls on waste imports: Evidence from China's Green Fence campaign

The international trade of waste has been an important and growing part of the global economy during the last two decades, which imposes regulatory challenges to governments in the South to protect the environment. This paper investigates the effect of border controls with a difference-in-difference design by exploiting a unique natural experiment, China's Operation Green Fence (OGF) implemented in 2013. We find that the OGF exerted a significant deterrent effect on the waste imported into China. Specifically, we find that the import weight of waste grew by 9.48 percentage less and the import price declined by 7.6 percentage more compared to those of the non-waste. The results are robust to a series of robustness checks, and there is no similar reaction in other regions, where the OGF was not initiated.