Hyejin Ku

Kellogg Labor Seminar | Gender Differences in College Migration

Seminar Series Website: https://sites.northwestern.edu/kellogglaborseminar/

Questions to: Aidan Kyle (aidan.kyle@k.n.e) or Kevin Lim (kevin.lim@k.n.e).

Abstract:

We study gender differences in college migration—attending university outside one’s hometown—using China’s centralized admission system and administrative data covering the universe of National College Entrance Examination takers. Conditional on exam performance, girls are 4.5 percentage points less likely than boys to enroll outside their home province, with the gap larger in areas with more traditional gender-role attitudes. Exploiting policy-driven university expansions and pre-policy admission quotas across provinces, we estimate the causal return to migration and find it to be similar for both genders. Our estimates imply that closing the gender gap in college migration would reduce the gender gap in elite university attendance by 20.9% and in expected wages by 11.4%. To investigate potential drivers of these differences, we survey parents and find suggestive evidence that lower perceived returns to migration for daughters, heightened safety concerns, and stronger preferences for a local spouse are the primary drivers.