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Does Schooling Pay? Evidence from China

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  • La, Vincent

Abstract

The effect of education on wages has been a widely explored topic. This paper will contribute to the existing literature by studying the causal effect of education on wages in China, a context which has been far less studied. China's compulsory education laws and minimum age labor laws provide potentially exogenous changes in educational attainment. The first goal of this paper will be to estimate the private return to education in China (the effect of an extra year of individual educational attainment on wages). Using China's compulsory education law as an instrument for individual educational attainment, we fail to find a statistically significant return on education in aggregate. However, using China's minimum age labor law as an instrument, we find that an increase in individual educational attainment by one year raises earnings by about 9%.

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  • La, Vincent, 2014. "Does Schooling Pay? Evidence from China," MPRA Paper 54578, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:54578
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    11. Zhang, Junsen & Zhao, Yaohui & Park, Albert & Song, Xiaoqing, 2005. "Economic returns to schooling in urban China, 1988 to 2001," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(4), pages 730-752, December.
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    Cited by:

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    2. Assaad, Ragui & Aydemir, Abdurrahman B. & Dayioglu-Tayfur, Meltem & Kirdar, Murat Güray, 2023. "Wage Returns to Human Capital Resulting from an Extra Year of Primary School: Evidence from Egypt," IZA Discussion Papers 16037, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    3. Ragui Assaad & Abdurrahman Aydemir & Meltem Dayioglu & Guray Kirdar, 2016. "Returns to Schooling in Egypt," Working Papers 1000, Economic Research Forum, revised May 2016.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Labor Market; Education; Effect of Education on Wages; Private Return to Schooling;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I20 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - General
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General

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