Does Examination Hell Pay Off? A Cost-Benefit Analysis of "Ronin" and College Education in Japan

Hiroshi Ono ()

No 346, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: College-bound students in Japan undergo a process of intense preparation known as examination hell. An extreme manifestation of examination hell is the ronin phenomenon. Typically thirty percent of students choose the ronin option under which they spend years in addition to high school preparing for the next year fs college entrance examinations. Using the mean scores of the entrance examinations as a measure of college quality, I find that college quality significantly improves the internal rate of return (IRR) to college education among the sample of male graduates in Japan. Ronin increases earnings indirectly by improving the quality of the college attended. I also show that the IRR with respect to ronin is one of diminishing returns. On average, the number of ronin years which maximizes the IRR is found to be somewhere between one and two years.

Keywords: Human capital formation; economics of education; examination hell; ronin; cost-benefit analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 1999-11-30, Revised 2006-01-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-his
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Published in Economics of Education Review, 2007, pages 271-284.

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Journal Article: Does examination hell pay off ? A cost-benefit analysis of "ronin" and college education in Japan (2007)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:hastef:0346

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