Title: Arrival of Young Talents: Send-down Movement and Rural Education in China
Speaker: Fan Ziying
Date: March 23, 2018
Time：10:00-11:30
Venue: Conference Room 106B, Zhonghui Building, Jinan University

A Brief Introduction to the Speaker:
Fan Ziying is a professor of the School of Public and Management at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and a young scholar of the Yangtze River. He mainly studies public finance, development economics, and regional economics. He has published in domestic and foreign famous journals such as Economic Economics, Economic Research, Economics (quarterly), Management World, and World Economy. More than a dozen papers. (2006-2007) The Best Academic Paper Award and the 5th Huangda-Mondale Economics Award.

Fan Ziying is a professor of the School of Public and Management of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics as well as a a young scholar of the Yangtze River. His research mainly covers Public Finance, Development Economics and Regional Economics. Until now he has published a dozen of papers in domestic and foreign famous journals such as Economic Economics, Economic Research, Economics (quarterly), Management World, and World Economy. He also won the Best Academic Paper Award and the 5th Huangda-Mondale Economics Award from 2006 to 2007.

Abstract:
Understanding human capital spillovers is important for both theory of economic growth and public policy in education. However, empirical evidence is sparse. Convincing identification requires an exogenous relocation of a group of better-educated people. China's sent-down youth (SDY) movement serves as an excellent natural experiment. From 1962 to 1979, the government mandated the temporary resettlement of roughly 18 million urban youth to rural areas. Using a unique county-level data set compiled from over 3,000 local gazetteers, we estimate how rural children's exposure to those better-educated urban youth affects their educational attainment. Our identification strategy builds on two sources of variation. First, counties received different numbers of SDYs during the movement. Second, within the same county, children of different cohorts were exposed differently depending on how their schooling years overlapped with the movement. Empirical results suggest that the arrival of SDYs increases local rural children's education and improve their attitudes towards education. More interestingly, we find evidence that SDYs coming from far away exert greater externalities.