学校质量、个人禀赋与教育回报的城乡差距 (School Quality, Innate Ability, and the Urban-Rural Disparity in Returns to Schooling in China)

Abstract

Chinese abstract: 本文利用2013年中国家庭收入调查数据（CHIP）研究相同学历水平城乡居民的教育回报差距及其来源。为避免样本自选择问题，本文使用居民12岁时的户口性质划分城乡居民。我们发现控制家庭背景等因素后，教育回报的城乡差距随学历水平的增加不断扩大：对于小学及以下、初中、高中和大专及以上学历，其估计值分别为-17.2%、-9.8%、0%和10.2%。这种差距主要来源于城乡居民学校质量和先天禀赋的差异：对所有学历组，城市居民的平均禀赋都低于同等学历的农村居民，但在基础教育阶段享受到更高质量的学校教育，因而积累了更多的人力资本，弥补了其在个人禀赋方面的劣势，且这一效应随着学历上升而得到增强。通过使用生均高职称教师数作为改进的教育质量衡量指标，我们发现，如果保持其他条件不变，而将农村学校质量提升至与城市相同，90后农村初中、高中毕业生的教育回报将分别提高大约21%和61%。因此，政府应着力提高农村地区的学校质量，从而提高农村居民的教育回报，进而激励农村居民提高整体受教育水平，缩小城乡收入差距。 English abstract: This paper studies how differences in school quality affect the returns to education of urban and rural residents in China using the CHIP 2013 data. To deal with biases due to self-selection in migration, we define urban and rural residents based on their Hukou status at age 12, a critical age when basic education is completed. We find that after controlling for family background, the gap in returns to education between urban and rural residents increases over the schooling stages; the gaps are -17.2%, -9.8%, 0%, and 10.2% for individuals with at most a primary school education, a middle school education, a highs school education, and a college education respectively. These gaps can be attributed to both school quality of basic education and individual innate ability. More specifically, conditional on schooling level, the expected innate ability of urban residents is lower than that of rural residents, but this disadvantage is more than compensated for by the higher quality of urban schools, and the cumulative quality advantage of urban schools increases as individuals progress through education stages. Using the number of senior teachers per student as a measure of school quality, we find that ceteris paribus, equalizing the quality of urban and rural schools will lead to a 21% and 61% increase in the return to a middle school and high school education respectively for rural residents born in the 1990s. Our findings indicate that China’s urban-rural income inequality is due not only to differences in education attainment but also to gaps in school quality between urban and rural residents.