Working Papers

College Expansion and Educational Attainment: A Study in China (Job Market Paper)

Standard human capital models without uncertainty rarely address the importance of the option value of education. The option value of a certain level of education lies in the opportunity it provides to obtain a higher level of education. Therefore, changes in option values can affect human capital investment decisions. This paper sheds light on this issue by studying the impact of China’s college enrollment expansion on educational attainment at the high school level. Combining survey data with provincial statistics and applying a difference-in-differences method, I find that college expansion has significantly increased the probabilities of enrolling in and completing high school. The probability of completing high school increased more than that of enrolling in high school. Female students benefited more, as did children whose mother had a high school degree.

 

Fertility and Women’s Labor Supply and Earnings

The relationship between fertility and female labor supply has been revisited a lot. Empirical studies have found negative correlation between the two but the causality remains unclear because of endogeneity of fertility. Most previous studies tackle this issue by instrumenting for fertility. This paper uses a plausible exogenous change, the relaxation of China’s One Child Policy, as an IV for family size to study the effects of childbearing on women’s labor supply and earnings. The preliminary results show that having more children decreases both women’s labor force participation and earnings significantly. Studies on mechanisms suggest that women with mother or mother-in-law alive are less affected by fertility. It also shows that women with more children tend to work in positions with more mobility and lower pay.

 

Work in Progress

“Long-term Consequences of China’s Great Famine 1959-1961”