short version published in: Applied Economics Letters, 2022, 29 (6), 489 - 494
China experienced a 47% expansion in higher education enrolment between 1998 and 1999, and a six-fold expansion in the decade to 2008. In this paper, we explore a fuzzy discontinuity in the months of births induced by the expansion to study the returns to higher education in China. We find that the mean years of education increased by roughly one full year around the cut-off point of the 1999 expansion as defined by months of births. Importantly, each additional year of university education induced by the 1999 higher education expansion increases monthly wage income by 21%, whereas the corresponding OLS estimate is only 8%. Our findings are insensitive to alternative window widths, functional forms, or the exclusion of the self-employed. Moreover, the returns to degrees also appear to vary by gender, with lowers returns to women except when they are the only child in the family.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.