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Estimating The Effects Of Educational System Contraction: The Case Of China’S Rural School Merger Initiative, Emily Hannum, Xiaoying Liu, Fan Wang
Estimating The Effects Of Educational System Contraction: The Case Of China’S Rural School Merger Initiative, Emily Hannum, Xiaoying Liu, Fan Wang
Emily C. Hannum
Contraction of educational systems can be a policy response to shrinking school-age cohorts. In China, fertility decline and unprecedented population outmigration have eroded school-aged populations in some rural communities, and a national policy to consolidate educational infrastructure in sparsely-populated rural districts was implemented in the early 2000s. This paper capitalizes on a unique household and village economic survey implemented in 2011 among households in 751 villages across 7 provinces in western China that collected information about primary school closures. 217 villages had school closures after 1999. We analyze impact on educational attainment with a difference-in-difference identification strategy by exploiting the …