TITLE:
Can Graduating from a Key University Really Increase People’s Market Returns? Evidence from China’s Urban Formal Labor Market (1993-2010)
AUTHORS:
Lan Zhang, Shengmin Pang
KEYWORDS:
“Project 211” University, Formal Labor Market, Career Cycle, Market Returns
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.8 No.10,
October
15,
2020
ABSTRACT: As the continuous increasing of the
total number of workers with the undergraduate degree, it is not going to university but going to what kind of university becomes
increasingly important on affecting the returns of labor market. Using the adult data from the China Family Panel Studies
in 2010 and based on the OLS regression model, this paper analyzes the market returns
variation of workers graduated from universities
of “project 211” and non-“project
211”. The result shows that the market returns of workers who graduated from “project
211” universities are significantly higher than those of workers who graduated from
non-“project 211” universities. Although the estimation coefficient based on the
propensity score matching method is slightly less than the partial regression coefficient
of OLS regression results, the result is still significant. Therefore, the result
once again supports the human capital theory, and rejects the screening theory.