The goal of this article was to document and explain the gap in educational achievement between Han and minority students in primary schools in western China. In our survey of 300 schools in Shaanxi, Gansu, and Qinghai provinces (involving nearly 21,000 fourth- and fifth-grade students), we find large differences in achievement on standardized exams between Han and minority students. On average, minority students perform 0.25 SD lower in math and 0.22 SD lower in Chinese. Most strikingly, minority students who do not generally speak Mandarin as their primary language score 0.62 SD lower than Han in math and 0.65 SD lower than Han in Chinese.

Using decomposition methods pioneered by Oaxaca (1973) and Blinder (1973), we find that most of the achievement gap between Han and minority students with no alternative ethnic language can be explained by differences in endowments of student, family, and school characteristics. Of these, differences in students and family characteristics appear to contribute the most to differences in achievement. Little of the gap between Han students and non-Mandarin minority students (Salar and Tibetan in our sample), however, can be explained by endowment differences. Comparing these students only to Han students in the same schools significantly reduces the size of the achievement gap, yet a difference of more than 0.2 SD persists. None of this remaining gap is explained by differences in endowments. Although several explanations are possible, we believe that a likely explanation is that the ability of students to learn may be hindered by difficulty comprehending instruction in Mandarin (given that no schools in our sample provided instruction or texts in minority languages). While we cannot say with certainty why these students may benefit less from a given amount of schooling inputs, our analysis suggests that teachers play a significant role.

Officials in China claim that voting rates in rural village elections are high. Unfortunately, these rates are assumptions, not facts. The true voting rate is lower, and much lower for women. We postulate that this could be due to insufficient knowledge about their rights.

The objective of this paper is to test whether women and village leaders’ knowledge about women’s voting rights affects women’s voting behavior. We report on the results of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 700 women in China’s Fujian and Liaoning Provinces. Villages were randomly assigned to either a control group or one of three intervention groups. One intervention provided voting training to women only, another provided training to both women and village leaders and the third provided training to village leaders only.

The data show that after women received training, their scores on a test of voting knowledge increased and they more fully exercised their voting rights. When only village leaders were trained, test scores and voting behaviors were not statistically different from the control villages.

A significant gap remains between rural and urban students in the rate of admission to senior high school. One reason for this gap may be the high levels of tuition and fees for senior high school. By reducing student expectations of attending high school, high tuition and fees can reduce student academic performance in junior high school. In this paper we evaluate the impact of a senior high tuition relief program on the test scores of poor, rural seventh grade students in China. We surveyed three counties in Shaanxi Province and exploit the fact that, while the counties are adjacent to one another and share similar characteristics, only one of the three implemented a tuition relief program. Using several alternative estimation strategies, including Difference-in-Differences (DD), Difference-in-Difference-in- Differences (DDD), Propensity Score Matching (Matching) and Difference-in-Differences Matching (DD Matching), we find that the tuition program has a statistically significant and positive impact on the math scores of seventh grade students. More importantly, this program is shown to have a statistically significant and positive effect on the poorest students in the treatment group compared to their wealthier peers.

Despite both requirements of and support for universal education up to grade 9, there are concerning reports that China is still suffering from high and maybe even rising dropout rates in some poor rural areas. Unfortunately, besides aggregated statistics from the Ministry of Education (which show almost universal compliance with the nine year compulsory education law), there is little independent, survey-based evidence on the nature of dropout in China. Between 2009 and 2010 we surveyed over 7,800 grade 7, 8, and 9 students from 46 randomly selected junior high schools in four counties in two provinces in North and Northwest China to measure the dropout rate. We also used the survey data to examine the factors that are correlated with dropping out, such as the opportunity cost of going to school, household poverty, and poor academic performance. According to the study’s findings, dropout rates between grade 7 and grade 8 reached 5.7 percent; dropout rates between grade 8 and grade 9 reached 9.0 percent. This means of the total number of students that matriculated into junior high school (those who were attending school during the first month of the first term of grade 7), 14.2 percent had left school by the first month of grade 9. Dropout rates were even higher for students that were older, from poorer families (and families in which the parents were not healthy), or were performing more poorly academically. We conclude that although the government’s policy of reducing tuition and fees for junior high students may be necessary, it is not sufficient to solve the dropout problem.

This paper examines the academic performance of migrant students in migrant schools in China and explores determinants of their performance. The paper compares academic performance, student backgrounds and measures of school quality between Beijing migrant schools and rural public schools in Shaanxi province. Furthermore, we employ multivariate regression to examine how individual characteristics and school quality affect migrant student performance and the achievement gap between students in migrant schools and those in rural public schools. We find that although students in Beijing migrant schools outperform students in Shaanxi’s rural public schools when they initially arrive in Beijing, they gradually lose ground to rural students due to the poorer school resources teachers in migrant schools. Additional analysis comparing migrant students in migrant schools to migrant students in Beijing public schools demonstrates that given access to better educational resources, migrant school students may be able to significantly improve their performance.

Many educational systems have struggled with the question about how best to give out financial aid. In particular, if students do not know the amount of financial aid that they are receive before they make a decision about where to go to college and what major to study, it may distort their decision. This study utilizes an experiment (implemented by ourselves as a Randomized Control Trial) to analyze whether or not an alternative way of providing financial aid--by providing an early commitment on financial aid during the student's senior year of high school instead of after entering college--affects the college decision making of poor students in rural China. We find that if early commitments are made early enough; and they are large enough, students will make less distorting college decisions.

The overall goal of the paper is to understand the progress of the design and implementation of China’s New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) program between 2004 (the second year of the program) and 2007. In the paper we seek to assess some of the strengths and weaknesses of the program using a panel of national- representative, household survey data that were collected in 2005 and early 2008. According to our data, we confirm the recent reports by the Ministry of Health that there have been substantial improvements to the NCMS program in terms of coverage and participation. We also show that rural individuals also perceive an improvement in service by 2007. While the progress of the NCMS program is clear, there are still weaknesses. Most importantly, the program clearly does not meet one of its key goals of providing insurance against catastrophic illnesses. On average, individuals that required inpatient treatment in 2007 were reimbursed for 15% of their expenditures. Although this is higher than in 2004, on average, as the severity of the illness (in terms of expenditures on health care) rose, the real reimbursement rate (reimbursement amount/total expenditure on medical care) fell. The real reimbursement rate for illnesses that required expenditures between 4000 and 10000 yuan (over 10000 yuan) was only 11% (8%). Our analysis shows that one of the limiting factors is constrained funding.

Previous studies have found that the returns to education in rural China are far lower than estimates for other developing economies. In this paper, we seek to determine why previous estimates are so low and provide estimates of what we believe are more accurate measures of the returns. Whereas estimates for the early 1990s average 2.3 percent, we find an average return of 6.4 percent. Furthermore, we find even higher returns among younger people, migrants, and for post-primary education. The paper demonstrates that, although part of the difference between our estimate and previous estimates can be attributed to increasing returns during the 1990s, a larger part of the difference is due to the nature of the data and the methodological approaches used by other authors.

Testing the tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family is complicated by the endogeneity of family size. Using data from the Chinese Population Census, this paper examines the effect of family size on child educational attainment in China. We find a negative correlation between family size and child educational attainment, even after we control for the birth order effect. We then instrument family size by the exogenous variation that is induced by a twin birth, and find a causal link between family size and children’s education. We also find that the effect of family size is more evident in rural China, where the public education system is poor. These findings suggest a quantity-quality tradeoff of children in developing countries.