Educated Youth Should Go to the Rural Areas: a Tale of Education, Employment and Social Values*
Educated Youth Should Go to the Rural Areas: A Tale of Education, Employment and Social Values* Yang You† Harvard University This draft: July 2018 Abstract I use a quasi-random urban-dweller allocation in rural areas during Mao’s Mass Rustication Movement to identify human capital externalities in education, employment, and social values. First, rural residents acquired an additional 0.1-0.2 years of education from a 1% increase in the density of sent-down youth measured by the number of sent-down youth in 1969 over the population size in 1982. Second, as economic outcomes, people educated during the rustication period suffered from less non-agricultural employment in 1990. Conversely, in 2000, they enjoyed increased hiring in all non-agricultural occupations and lower unemployment. Third, sent-down youth changed the social values of rural residents who reported higher levels of trust, enhanced subjective well-being, altered trust from traditional Chinese medicine to Western medicine, and shifted job attitudes from objective cognitive assessments to affective job satisfaction. To explore the mechanism, I document that sent-down youth served as rural teachers with two new county-level datasets. Keywords: Human Capital Externality, Sent-down Youth, Rural Educational Development, Employment Dynamics, Social Values, Culture JEL: A13, N95, O15, I31, I25, I26 * This paper was previously titled and circulated, “Does living near urban dwellers make you smarter” in 2017 and “The golden era of Chinese rural education: evidence from Mao’s Mass Rustication Movement 1968-1980” in 2015. I am grateful to Richard Freeman, Edward Glaeser, Claudia Goldin, Wei Huang, Lawrence Katz, Lingsheng Meng, Nathan Nunn, Min Ouyang, Andrei Shleifer, and participants at the Harvard Economic History Lunch Seminar, Harvard Development Economics Lunch Seminar, and Harvard China Economy Seminar, for their helpful comments.
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