Exams, districts, and intergenerational mobility: Evidence from South Korea

Yong Suk Lee

Labour Economics, 2014, vol. 29, issue C, 62-71

Abstract: This paper examines how student assignment rules impact intergenerational mobility. High school admission had traditionally been exam based in South Korea. However, between 1974 and 1980 the central government shifted several cities to a school district based admission system. I estimate the impact of this reform on the intergenerational income elasticity. Results indicate that the reform increased the intergenerational income elasticity from 0.15 to 0.31. Furthermore, I find that district assignment increases the impact of parental income on migration to reform cities. The probability of migration associated with a 10% increase in parental income increased by 1.7 percentage points after the reform. In sum, I find that the shift from a merit to a location based student assignment rule decreases intergenerational mobility and promotes selective migration by higher income households.

Keywords: Intergenerational mobility; Merit based admission; School districts; Migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I28 J62 R23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537114000694
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:labeco:v:29:y:2014:i:c:p:62-71

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2014.05.006

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().