The effect of education expansion on intergenerational transmission of education: Evidence from China

Ling Liu and Qian Wan

China Economic Review, 2019, vol. 57, issue C

Abstract: More than 70 million people have attained a tertiary education due to China's higher education expansion (CHEE). Using data from the Chinese Household Income Project Survey, we examine how dose education expansion have an effect on the intergenerational transmission of education (ITE) by using the exogenous surge brought by CHEE. Our finding is that, after carefully addressing the interference induced by the Compulsory Education Laws and the selection bias caused by intergenerational co-residence, CHEE reduces ITE when educational achievement is measured by schooling years. However, when taking the quality of higher education into account, we find that CHEE does not have a significant effect on ITE, which suggests that the intergenerational inequality in higher education remains. Moreover, we identify the mechanism that the inequality in the quality of high school education extends to tertiary education to explains our findings. To account for the mixed findings in previous literatures, we further propose a general framework for understanding the effect of education expansion on ITE.

Keywords: Higher education expansion; Intergenerational transmission of education; Inequality of opportunity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:57:y:2019:i:c:s1043951x19300884

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2019.101327

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