Rates of Return to University Education: An Application of Regression Discontinuity Design
2011/12/06
研討會日期 : 2011-12-06
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Elliott Fan
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Elliott Fan received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Toronto in 2006. He is currently serving as Assistant Professor of Economics at National Taiwan University. His research field is in family economics, labor economics and development economics.
演講摘要 : Estimating the rates of return to university education has always been difficult due to the problem of omitted variable bias. Benefiting from a special feature of the University Admission system in China, which has clear cutoffs for university entry, combined with a unique data set with information on individual National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) scores, we estimate the Local Average Treatment Effects (LATE) of university education based on a Regression Discontinuity design. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to use RD design to estimate the causal effect of a university education on earnings. Our empirical results suggest that the return to a 4-year university education is a 36 to 59 percent increase of earnings, when compared to a control group consisting of individuals who attended NCEE but failed to gain admission to university (their highest education levels are either senior high school or three-year college). Further examinations suggest that the treatment effects are likely to be heterogeneous for compliers and non-compliers and the LATEs are likely to be larger than the ATEs.
