Dynamics of Return to Elite University Education: Evidence from the Chinese Labor Market

Time: Monday, October 22, 2018 12:00-13:30

Location: Room 610, Mingde Main Building

Speaker: Lei Zhang

Host: Zhang Jing

This paper estimates the return to an elite university education over a college graduate’s career using the CHIP 2013 data. We find substantial premium for graduating from an elite university at job entry, but it declines quickly with labor market experience. This pattern is entirely driven by the young cohorts who enter college after the higher education expansion that started in 1999. This pattern is more pronounced in coastal provinces and in economically more developed regions. The results are consistent with the theory of statistical discrimination, which predicts that in a competitive market with asymmetric information employers tend to pay workers based on more easily observable characteristics as a proxy for productivity at job entry but rely less on these over time when more information about true productivity is revealed.

Lei Zhang is an associate professor of economics at the Antai College of Economics and Management of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She received her PhD in economics from Stanford University and BA in economics from Peking University. Her primary research area is public economics, with a special interest in the economics of education. Her research in the economics of education focuses on questions of how policies affect individuals’ educational achievement and economic outcome and the aggregate economic performance including economic growth and income distribution. She has published in the Economic Journal, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, among others.