UCLA

This dissertation consists of three chapters that focus on policy changes related to education in China. The first chapter reviews the education and examination system in China, covering preschool education, primary education, secondary education, and higher education. Given the particular form of socialism with Chinese characteristics, understanding the context of school choice in China is rather interesting. It is clear that the education and examination system in China is strongly influenced by socio-cultural changes and conditions as well as Chinese culture. Eorts have been made by the State to improve education quality and promote equality across regions. However, challenges still remain, including disparities in education expenditures, admission rates, enrollment opportunities at the provincial level, and urban-rural education attainment.

The second chapter estimates the effect of access to quality education on house prices using difference-in-differences methods and a large-scale policy change. Exploring three different policies implemented in the 2014 Beijing Education Reform, I identify parents' valuation on the different extent of children's exposure to elite (key) elementary schools. The results show that parents are willing to pay a price premium of 5.51% or $77.36 to get their kids full access to the benets associated with key schools, even the admission rate to top middle school remain unchanged. I further show that parents are result-driven, which means that they are willing to pay around 9.16% more to guarantee the admission of their kids to top middle school, keeping the primary school characteristics the same.

In the third chapter, we question the effectiveness of key (magnet) school systems in China. Given that parents are paying a price premium for what they perceive to be high-quality schools, we would like to ask whether the investment into these schools is worth it. We use a set of newly released data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to explore the relationship between key school attendance and students' academic performance. We measured school quality using students' performances in mathematics and language tests, which can be considered as an important indicator of school quality in the absence of national standardized tests. The results from the OLS regression show that there is a positive relationship between attending a key primary school and test scores, but the coefficient becomes insignificant after controlling for individual characteristics and family background. Furthermore, we used propensity score matching (PSM) to alleviate the imbalance of characteristics for students who enrolled in key schools and those who did not. Based on our results, we did not nd any evidence supporting that key school enrollment improves children's test scores; academic outcomes among students enrolled in key schools were not signicfiantly different from that of those enrolled in non-key schools.