The massification of higher education has dramatically changed the association between credentials and jobs in advanced countries, while its impacts in transitional economies have received less academic attention. To address this research lacuna, the paper utilizes rich information from China's national surveys of college graduates from 2003 to…

This dissertation presents three separate essays. The first two essays explore the gender wage gap and its dynamics in urban China from 1995 to 2018. The first chapter decomposes the gender wage gap based on the observed wage for workers with a precise measure of the hourly wages. The first chapter examines the observed average gender wage gap in…

A burgeoning literature has documented the importance of elite colleges. Yet, little is known about access to elite education and its labor market implications in China, a country that produces one in every five college graduates in the world. College admission in China is governed by a single exam--the national college entrance exam, and the…

Using the China Family Panel Studies, we identify the subjects studied by vocational college and university graduates, with the latter group further divided into ordinary and key universities. While the returns are around 8-10% to attending colleges and ordinary universities, there are higher returns of 12-16% per annum to attending the more…

Internships are a vital component of vocational education systems. The aim of this study is to understand whether internship programs at vocational schools are correlated with the long-run wages of students. To analyze this, I conduct three sets of analyses using longitudinal survey data from 2013 to 2014 on more than 12,000 vocational students in…

We use the method of Dominitz and Manski [1996. Eliciting student expectations of the return to schooling. "Journal of Human Resources" 31, no. 1: 1-26] to solicit anticipated wage distributions for continuing to a master degree or going to work after completing the bachelor degree. The means of the distributions have an effect on…

This study aims to explore the impact of college quality on early labor market outcomes in China, including the fresh college graduates' initial employment status and starting wages for students who graduated in 2011. The main data source is the College Student Labor Market (CSLM) survey conducted by Tsinghua University. Distinguished from…

Return on personal investment is an important factor affecting the decision to invest in education. This article analyzes the personal education costs of no-fee preservice students, estimates and forecasts the return on their personal education investment, and compares the costs and benefits of for-fee preservice students and nonteaching students.…

Visa policies in the United States restrict job opportunities and job mobility for U.S.-trained PhDs who hold a temporary visa, a group that accounts for 40 percent of newly graduated PhDs in science and engineering. The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 (CSPA) allowed Chinese students to be eligible for permanent residence in the United…

We report evidence that university reputation affects wages of bachelors in China. An unconditional difference between a top-100 university and a top 400-500 university of 23% is increased to some 28% by adding controls. Within the top-100 there is no differentiation in pay-off. Self-rated quality of high school, while affecting quality of…

Using the data from a large-scale survey in Gansu province, China, the article explores the issue of school attendance among ethnic minority children from the perspective of cultural capital. We find that the rate of school attendance among ethnic minority children is substantially lower than that among ethnic Han children, but that ethnic…

The paper estimates the returns to overeducation by the Over-Required and Undereducation (ORU) model. The estimated results indicate that the returns to overeducation are positive, but lower than the returns to required education, which suggests that while overeducated employees' earnings are diminished, they still can benefit from it. The paper…

Technology provides a new and effective tool for accelerating economic growth, and developing countries are embracing technology and education as the means toward attaining economic parity with the United States and other developed nations. Evidence suggests that this strategy is paying off. Developing countries are building a technology…