Topic：Family background, social welfare and performance under pressure: evidence from a welfare reform in rural China

Speaker：LI, Fanghua (University of New South Wales' Business School)

Time：Dec. 15, 2021 (Wed.), 15:30-17:00pm

Venue：Chengze Garden 345

Summary：

This paper explores a quasi-experiment in China that provides a selected group of people with better social welfare protection in multifaceted aspects, to examine how family background and the social welfare level affect people's relative performance under competitive pressure separately. Our setting is the China's National College Entrance Exam (CEE), widely regarded as the world's most competitive exam. In terms of people's relative performance on high-stakes CEE vs. low-stakes mock examinations held three months earlier, male students from poor families are comparable to their counterparts from higher-income ones. Moreover, with the improved social welfare level, male students significantly over-perform in the high-stakes settings whereas female students are not affected. These effects are more pronounced for students for whom the social welfare matters more in present or in the future and the insignificant welfare impact on girls is caused by the economic incentives generated by patrilocality.

Speaker bio：

Fanghua Li is an Assistant Professor at University of New South Wales' Business School. She received his PhD in 2018 from the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles and BA from Renmin University of China in 2010.

Her research is in labor economics and development economics, particular in the areas of poverty alleviation, migration and education. She stayed in Chinese poor counties in the past two years for better understanding of the Targeted Poverty Alleviation practice of China. Her work has been published in Journal of Econometrics, Economic Research Journal (经济研究) and Social Sciences in China (中国社会科学) etc. .