This paper contributes to the assessment of China's rural labor markets, while paying attention to whether these markets are developing in a manner conducive to the nation's modernization. According to our household survey, we find that the rapid increase in off-farm employment has continued and...

This study seeks to explain the differences in infrastructure quality across China’s villages. Using primary data on three main types of infrastructure projects in rural China, we find that a.) between-project within-village quality differences are small and project design has little...

China has made remarkable progress along the path of economic transformation over the past three decades. To continue its rapid growth in an economy with increasingly higher wages, China’s key challenge is whether it can become competitive in quasi-skilled and skilled industrial sectors so...

The main goal of this paper is to document the nature of boarding schools and empirically analyze the difference of nutrition intake and malnutrition status between boarding and non-boarding students in western rural China. By using two data sets about boarding schools and boarding students in...

Despite the rise in grade retention in poor areas in rural China recently, little work has been done to understand the impact of grade retention on the educational performance of students in these areas in rural China. This paper seeks to redress this shortcoming and examines the effect of grade...

Students from poor, rural areas of China receive less secondary schooling than their urban peers in part because of high direct and opportunity costs. This study uses a randomized controlled trial to estimate the effectiveness of providing early commitment for financial aid (ECFA) in mitigating...

We estimate the impact of two early commitment of financial aid (ECFA) programs—near the start and one near the end of junior high school (seven than ninth grades, respectively)—on the out comes of poor, rural junior high students in China. Our results demonstrate that neither of the ECFA...

The rapid expansion of enrollment capacity in China's colleges since the late 1990s has come at the price of high tuition hikes. China's government has put forth financial aid programs to enable poor students to access higher education. Although studies have shown that poor high school students...

Recent studies have shown that only about two-thirds of the students from poor, rural areas in China finish junior high school and enter high school. One factor that may be behind the low rates of high school attendance is that students may be misinformed about the returns to schooling or lack...