Working Papers
1. “Market Access and Educational Inequality in China” (under active revision)
Abstract:
This paper studies how expanding market access, along with the restrictive household registration system and rural land policies, magnify rural-urban college educational inequality in China. By extending the traditional new economic geographical model, I investigated the channels through which market access could affect individual’s education choice. The first channel is standard in new economic geography model: higher market access increases the relative wages of skilled labor over unskilled labor, and thus raises the return of the investment in higher education. The second channel that intensifies the rural-urban education disparity works through the farmland. The farmland attached exclusively to rural hukou status will be retrieved by the local village government when a rural hukou holder enrolls in college, because rural hukou status is required by law to be converted to urban status with college enrollment. The loss of the right to farmland use thus constitutes an extra cost of higher education for rural hukou holders. Expanding access to global market makes the higher education for rural people more costly due to the accelerating of urbanization and the growing potential value of farmland. The rural-urban education disparities are predicted to get aggravated as China joins WTO and expanded its access to global market. Moreover, the effects of increasing market access on urban-rural dispersion varies across regions. Regions endowed with more market potential tend to have more severe intraregional higher education inequality. I further brought the predictions to empirical examination and quantified the effects imposed by market access on individuals’ education decisions by using China Income Project Data for year 1995 and 2002. The empirical evidences demonstrate that each one percent increase in market access is associated with an increase in the difference between the probability of getting higher education for urban hukou holders by around 1.2 percentage points than that for rural hukou holders. Reforming hukou system will not achieve the purpose of alleviating rural-urban inequality without fully addressing the land use issues associated with hukou.
2.“Quantifying the Welfare Effect of Chinese Capital-Biased Production Subsidies” with Chi-Yuan Chai
3."China Education Reform and the Labor Productivity" (available on request)
Publications
Extreme heat and exports: evidence from Chinese exporters. China economic review. 2021 Apr 1;66:101593. With Chengzheng Li & Jiajia Cong
Land titling, human capital misallocation, and agricultural productivity in China. Journal of Development Economics. 2023 Oct 1;165:103165. with Shouying Liu, Sen Ma, Jiong Zhu
Working in Progress
1.“Trade Policy uncertainty, Credit Constraints and the Export Dynamics” with Chi-Yuan Chai
2.“Quantifying the Welfare Effect of Trade Liberalization under the regime of State Capitalism”
with Chi-Yuan Chai