Intergenerational mobility and institutional change in 20th century China

Yuyu Chen, Suresh Naidu, Tinghua Yu and Noam Yuchtman

Explorations in Economic History, 2015, vol. 58, issue C, 44-73

Abstract: We examine the persistence of socioeconomic status across generations, measured by educational attainment, among urban Chinese born between 1930 and 1985. The persistence of status follows a pronounced, robust U-shaped pattern, falling among cohorts educated following the Communist revolution of 1949, and rising among cohorts educated following the reforms of the late 1970s. The pattern is not driven by the Cultural Revolution or by changing associations between education and income. The U-shape also appears in complementary datasets covering rural China. We discuss the policies behind a non-monotonic relationship between educational expansion and social mobility across the institutional regimes we study.

Keywords: Social mobility; China; Economic transition; Educational policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I28 J62 N35 P36 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498315000352
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Intergenerational mobility and institutional change in 20th century China (2015)
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:eee:exehis:v:58:y:2015:i:c:p:44-73

DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2015.07.001

Access Statistics for this article

Explorations in Economic History is currently edited by R.H. Steckel

More articles in Explorations in Economic History from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().