Lecture Title

Weathering the Storm: How do Free Compulsory Education and Early-life Shocks Shape Long-Term Education Attainment?

Abstract

We explore how early-life shocks interact with subsequent human capital investments to impact individuals’ long-term educational attainment. Leveraging the rollout of free compulsory education reform in rural China and early-life rainfall shocks as two sources of exogenous variation, we employ cohort difference-in-differences and triple differences methods to identify the causal effects on educational outcomes. We show that exposure to the reform significantly improves grade completion during compulsory schooling. Conversely, early-life adverse rainfall substantially decreases educational attainment, leading to an average decrease in schooling of 0.2–0.4 years. However, longer exposure to the reform mitigates these adverse effects, with approximately three additional semesters of enrollment compensating for a one standard-deviation increase in early-life extreme rainfall exposure. Our findings suggest a dynamic substitutability rather than complementarity between family and government human capital investments.

Speaker

Prof. Wang Yaojing

Assistant Professor and Researcher, School of Economics, Peking University

Time

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

12:30–14:00

Venue

Room 347, Qiushi Building

Language

Chinese and English

Host

Prof. Zhao Liqiu

Speaker Bio

Prof. Wang Yaojing is an Assistant Professor, Researcher, and Doctoral Advisor at the School of Economics, Peking University. Her research focuses on labor and education economics, as well as public economics. She has led projects funded by the National Social Science Fund of China, with research outcomes published in prestigious journals such as Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, China Economic Review, and Economic Science.