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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Sara MaioliORCiD, Nichola Latoya Williams
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
The 2006 free compulsory education reform in rural China represents a pioneering initiative that paved the way for China’s rural development. However, there is a notable lack of evaluations assessing its long-term impacts. This paper examines the long-run effects of free compulsory education on labour supply, exploiting cross-province variations in the implementation of this reform using nationally representative data in China. Using a cohort Difference-in-Differences (DID) specification, we find that exposure to free compulsory education significantly increases the probability of employment and reduces the probability of unemployment. For the employed population, they shift from the agricultural sector to the tertiary sector, engage more in formal employment and less in farming, informal employment, and entrepreneurship. These results are attributed to improvements in educational outcomes (evidenced by higher high school graduation probabilities), cognitive abilities (evidenced by higher vocabulary and mathematics test scores), and health outcomes (evidenced by better physical and mental health). This reform narrows the gender gap in employment, particularly formal employment with signed labour contracts, as evidence shows that this reform has improved women’s human capital more than men’s. We examine how free compulsory educational reforms shape long-term labour supply and human capital, offering actionable insights for policymakers across developing countries.
Author(s): Cao Z, Maioli S, Williams N, Woodhouse D
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: The Journal of Development Studies
Year: 2026
Pages: epub ahead of print
Online publication date: 18/02/2026
Acceptance date: 09/01/2026
Date deposited: 18/02/2026
ISSN (print): 0022-0388
ISSN (electronic): 1743-9140
Publisher: Routledge
URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2026.2618668
DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2026.2618668
Data Access Statement: The data that support our study are available from CFPS project (http://www.isss.pku.edu.cn/cfps/en/ index.htm) and the National Bureau of Statistics (https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/). We have shared the replication codes for the empirical analysis via Figshare: 10.6084/m9.figshare.30273631.
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