题 目：Public Education Spending and Household Substitution in Urban China

时 间：2012年6月6日 星期三12:00 – 14:00

地 点：明德主楼714

报告人：张 磊

Abstract：Whether increases in school inputs lead to better education outcomes is essential for education policy-making. While empirical studies that aim to estimate this causal relationship abound, a consensus is lacking. One confounding factor that has mostly been ignored in the literature is the behavioral response of households to changes in public education policies by varying their own education inputs. This paper studies how increases in government spending on public schools affect household education spending in urban China. We use detailed information about household spending on public school tuition, textbooks, and private tutoring from the 2002-2006 Urban Household Survey data and focus on households with children in compulsory education (Grades 1-9). We provide evidence that municipal public education spending in China is exogenous to household preferences, and this allows us to identify a causal relationship. In a model controlling for city fixed effects, year-province fixed effects, local per capita GDP and growth rate of number of basic education students, and a wide range of household characteristics, we find that increases in public education spending lead to significant decreases in household spending on public school tuition and private tutoring but no change in spending on textbooks. In addition, while the reduction in household spending on tuition is quite homogeneous across income quintiles, the reduction in household spending on private tutoring comes primarily from the lowest income households, suggesting diverse educational demand. Moreover, the impact on private tutoring spending differs for metropolitan areas and smaller cities.

报告人简介：张磊，清华大学中国财政税收研究所高级研究员，于2004年毕业于斯坦福大学，获经济学博士学位。张磊博士曾任美国克莱姆森大学助理教授，美国加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校的访问学者，她的研究领域为公共经济学，中国经济，教育经济学，发展经济学等。她的多篇论文发表在《Journal of Development Economics》，《Journal of Human Capital》等国际顶尖期刊上。