Just Above the Exam Cutoff Score: Elite College Admission and Wages in China

Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li

No 28450, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: A burgeoning literature has documented the importance of elite colleges. Yet, little is known about access to elite education and its labor market implications in China, a country that produces one in every five college graduates in the world. College admission in China is governed by a single exam—the national college entrance exam, and the government sets admission cutoff scores for elite colleges. We examine the impacts of scoring above the elite-tier cutoff on a student's access to elite colleges and wage outcomes after graduation, using the discontinuity around the cutoff score. By employing hand-collected survey data, we find that scoring above the cutoff not only increases the chance of entering an elite college but also raises a young person's first-job wages after graduation. We also find that those just above the cutoff have peers with higher scores and better social networks than those below the cutoff, but it is less clear whether the two groups use their time differently in college.

JEL-codes: H1 I20 I25 I26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna and nep-edu
Note: ED LS PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Published as Jia, Ruixue & Li, Hongbin, 2021. "Just above the exam cutoff score: Elite college admission and wages in China," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 196(C).

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28450.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Just above the exam cutoff score: Elite college admission and wages in China (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:28450

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28450

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().