编号：E-2024-4-2
题目：Weathering the Storm: How do Free Compulsory Education and Early-life Shocks Shape Long-Term Education Attainment?
作者：Wenjing Peng, Yaojing Wang
联系方式：Yaojing Wang, wangyaojing@pku.edu.cn.
摘要：We explore how early-life shocks interact with subsequent human capital investments to impact individuals’ long-term education attainment. Leveraging the rollout of free compulsory
education reform in rural China and early-life rainfall shocks as two sources of exogenous variation, we employ cohort difference-in-differences and triple-differences methods to identify the causal effects on educational outcomes. We show that exposure to the reform significantly improves grade completion during compulsory schooling. Conversely, early-life adverse rainfall substantially decreases educational attainment, leading to an average decrease in schooling of 0.2-0.4 years. However, longer exposure to the reform mitigates these adverse effects, with approximately three additional semesters of enrolment compensating for a onestandard-deviation increase in early-life extreme rainfall exposure. Our findings suggest a dynamic substitutability rather than complementarity between family and government human capital investments.
关键词：Human capital investment, Education attainment, Dynamic substitutability, Free compulsory education reform, Early-life shocks
