Essays on the effects of parental education and private tutoring on children's education outcomes, and the rural-urban student achievement differential in China
Abstract
This thesis includes three empirical chapters, which are self-contained but all related to education inequality in China.
Chapter 2 aims to examine the causal effect (nurture effect) of parental education on children's education. Parents and their children share many common characteristics which are often unobserved -- this causes the omitted-variable bias. To eliminate this bias, this chapter uses school interruption during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR) as an instrument. The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) significantly interrupted one generation's education, but has had no direct effect on the next generation. It naturally provides a valid instrument. The empirical results suggest that in urban China, an one year decrease in parent's schooling because of school interruption during the CR leads to a 0.27-0.38 year decrease in the child's schooling; if a parent did not obtain a university degree because of school interruption during the CR, the child is 35-53 percent less likely to obtain a university degree. The results also suggest that maternal education has a greater influence on children's education than paternal education. Overall, for the particular group whose parental education was changed by the CR, this chapter confirms a significant and sizable nurture effect. Chapter 3 estimates the causal effect of private tutoring on Chinese and mathematics test scores of primary school students in urban China. Because the unobserved determinants of schooling achievement often influence private tutoring expenditure, OLS cannot provide a consistent estimate. This chapter adopts a heteroskedasticity based identification strategy proposed by Lewbel (2012) to handle this problem. The estimation results show that, on average, private tutoring expenditure has a small but statistically significant effect on the mathematics test scores of primary school students, but has no statistically significant effect on the Chinese test scores. A 1000 yuan (about 55% of a standard deviation) increase in private tutoring expenditure raises the primary school students' mathematics test scores by 0.80-0.87 percentage point (about 11% of a standard deviation). The instrumental variable quantile regression combined with the Lewbel method suggests that private tutoring is more likely to improve student achievement at the bottom end of test score distribution. When moving upward to the top end, the effect becomes smaller and even negative, despite not being significant.
Chapter 4 measures and analyzes the rural-urban schooling achievement gap in primary education in China. Using the RUMiC 2010 data, this chapter finds that the test scores of urban children are on average about 5.7 percentage points higher than that of rural children. This is approximately equivalent to 54-56% and 65-72% of the standard deviations of urban and rural children's test scores, respectively. The regression analysis and Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis suggest that urban children outperform their rural counterparts mainly because of their better socio-economic background (e.g. parental education and family income per capita), better school quality and higher government budgetary spending on education per student in cities.