Economics Seminar（2014-28）

Topic:The Mirage of Elite Schools: Evidence from Lottery-based School Admissions in China

Speaker:Hongliang Zhang

Affiliation: The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Time:Tuesday, 9 December. 14:00-15:30pm

Location:Room 217, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract：

In this paper we use school admission lotteries to estimate the effect of elite school attendance on student achievement in China. When combining students. lottery records and Middle School Exit Exam (MSEE) records, we encounter an imperfect matching problem due to the lack of a common unique identi.er. We develop a data combination procedure under imperfect matching and demonstrate that applying the standard IV estimand to our combined data set can still identify the local average treatment effect for lottery compliers. Despite the large observed superiority of elite schools in student achievement, we find little evidence that three-year attendance at an elite school improves students’ MSEE scores or secondary school admission outcomes. We also find that a school’s academic value-added and achievement level are largely uncorrelated in our context and that parents seem to choose schools based primarily on the latter. The fact that parents do not place high expressed weights on value-added in choosing schools also casts doubt on the potential of school choice to increase demand-side pressure for schools to improve effectiveness.

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