Speaker: Professor CHEN Yi
Avenue: Conference Room 618, School of Economics
Abstract: On the eve of its economic reforms, China achieved a much higher level of secondary education than other countries with a similar per capita income at the time, This study investigates the pre-reform formation of China's human capital by examining a massive rural education expansion program during the Cultural Revolution that increased the number of secondary schools more than tenfold. We estimate the impact of the expansion by compiling a new county-level data from local gazetteers and exploiting the county-level variation in the speed of expansion for the identification purpose. We provide strong evidence that the program significantly improved rural children's educational attainment and suggestive evidence that teachers contributed more to this improvement than schools. By building a pool of middle-skilled labor years later, the education expansion program boosted local agricultural yields and increased the productivity of the township and village enterprises that emerged after the reform, There is some evidence that this rapid expansion was associated with a deterioration in education quality.