Higher Education Expansion and the Rural–Urban Gap in Secondary Schooling and Labor Outcomes: Evidence from China’s 1999 Reform
(Job Market Paper; Published on Journal of Development Economics)This paper traces how China’s nationwide surge in university admissions in 1999 propagated upstream to the upper-secondary gate and downstream to labor allocation, with differential effects by rural status. Treating the tertiary expansion as an exogenous national supply shock, I link microdata from the 2015 1% Population Census to a difference-in-differences design with city-by-cohort fixed effects.I find that, relative to otherwise comparable urban cohorts, rural students exposed to the reform were 3.9 percentage points more likely to complete the academic high-school track and accumulated an additional 0.32 years of schooling. The expansion also reallocated rural labor away from low-skill sectors by 2.8 percentage points. These effects arise in China’s exam-based, capacity-constrained upper-secondary system—particularly in rural counties facing higher effective costs and fewer general-track seats per junior-high cohort.The evidence is consistent with an expectations-driven mechanism: national tertiary expansion raised the perceived attainability and payoff of the academic track for rural cohorts, inducing behavioral responses at the upper-secondary gate. The results suggest that higher-education capacity expansions can reshape earlier educational transitions even without direct changes in high-school seats.Legal Marriage-Age Reform, Early Marriage, & Fertility: Evidence from China’s 1981 Legal Marriage-Age Regulation
I exploit the nationwide abolition, on January 1, 1981, of administrative rules that had effectively raised the minimum legal marriage age above the statutory floor. Using women born 1951–1961 in the 2010 China 1% Census, I implement a two-stage regression-kink design that instruments age at first marriage with exposure at the statutory threshold.The reform generates a sharp change in the slope of marriage timing at age 20 for women. RKD/2SLS estimates indicate that delaying first marriage by one year lowers completed fertility by about 0.20 births. The effects are stronger in urban and more-educated groups, consistent with heterogeneous responsiveness to marriage-timing incentives. Results are robust to placebo cutoffs, flexible polynomials, alternative bandwidths, and province-by-cohort controls.Building Human Capital in Rural China: Long-Term Effects of Compulsory Education Reform
This paper examines the staggered 2006–2007 abolition of tuition and miscellaneous fees in rural compulsory education and its long-run effects on human capital and early-adult outcomes. I combine pooled microdata with administrative yearbook series and estimate a differences-in-differences framework comparing adjacent birth cohorts across provinces with different reform timing. Event-study diagnostics support the identification strategy.Exposure to the reform increases years of schooling and the probability of completing upper secondary. The largest gains occur among rural girls and students from poorer counties. I also document downstream shifts toward non-farm employment and delayed early marriage, consistent with a human-capital channel. Mechanisms include cost reductions, improved affordability, and better school inputs. Results remain robust to selective-migration checks, alternative timing codings, and province-by-cohort controls.Premarital Property and Marriage Timing: Evidence from China’s 2011 Marriage Law Interpretation
This ongoing project studies the 2011 Interpretation (III) of China’s Marriage Law, which changed ownership rules for premarital housing assets. Using 2010 and 2020 census microdata combined with city-level house prices, I estimate the policy’s effects on age at first marriage and household formation using an event-study framework.