Place-Based College Admission, Migration and the Spatial Distribution of Human Capital: Evidence from China

时间：9月29日14:00-15:30

地点：承泽园246教室

主讲人：杨宇

摘要：How to allocate college seats across regions is an important but often controversial question. It may imply a policy tradeoff between efficiency in human capital production and equality of opportunities for people growing up in different places. Regional disparity in college access also impacts the spatial distribution of college-educated workers and thus affects regional inequality in development. This paper studies the province-based college admission quotas in China and evaluates potential reforms. Despite longstanding concerns about the unequal quota allocation across provinces, little is known because China's college entrance exam is not comparable across provinces. Combining individual-level administrative data and college student surveys, I estimate a structural model of college and migration choice under quota constraints, together with a measurement model that can recover the nationally comparable distribution of pre-college human capital in each province. I find substantial gaps of pre-college human capital among college applicants across provinces, but these gaps are not well reflected by the admission quotas. A purely merit-based nationwide admission without provincial quotas increases efficiency at the cost of larger regional inequality: it increases college-student sorting and total human capital output during college, but decreases the college opportunity in less developed provinces and the share of college graduates working in those provinces.

主讲人介绍：杨宇，北京大学光华管理学院应用经济学系助理教授，2021年于美国威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校获得经济学博士学位。研究领域为公共经济学和劳动经济学，目前关注的研究话题包括教育政策、人口流动、老龄化、生育率、婚姻匹配等。研究成果发表于Journal of Development Economics、Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization等国际知名学术期刊。