经济学院2018年第十二次学术研讨会——宏观研讨班（五）

主讲人: 顾晓敏 博士研究生

单 位：游艇会线路检测中心

题 目:Arrival of Young Talents: Send-down Movement and Rural Education in China

时 间:2018年5月8日（周二）晚上19:30

地 点:经济学院402会议室

摘要： Understanding human capital spillovers is important for both theory of economic growth and public policy in education. However, empirical evidence is sparse. Convincing identification requires an exogenous relocation of a group of better-educated people. China's sent-down youth (SDY) movement serves as an excellent natural experiment. From 1962 to 1979, the government mandated the temporary resettlement of roughly 18 million urban youth to rural areas. Using a unique county-level data set compiled from over 3,000 local gazetteers, we estimate how rural children's exposure to those better-educated urban youth affects their educational attainment. Our identification strategy builds on two sources of variation. First, counties received different numbers of SDYs during the movement. Second, within the same county, children of different cohorts were exposed differently depending on how their schooling years overlapped with the movement. Empirical results suggest that the arrival of SDYs increases local rural children's education and improve their attitudes towards education. More interestingly, we find evidence that SDYs coming from far away exert greater externalities.