Does attending a key school have a quality premium? A regression discontinuity analysis

Abstract

This article investigates the effect of attending a key high school using unique administrative data collected from China. We employ regression discontinuity design to mitigate selection bias arising from unobservable individual ability. Our results show that attending a key high school has a positive effect on student’s college entrance examination score. The results are robust to various robustness checks.

Keywords:

• key school
• school quality
• student achievement
• regression discontinuity design

JEL Classification:

• I21
• I29

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support from Natural Science Foundation of China (nos. 70903044, 70933001 and 71103107). Haifeng Zhang also thanks the partial support from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Social Science Fund of Zhejiang Province.

Notes

¹  In China, high school students need to choose either arts/humanities or science as their major subjects. For arts and humanities students, the subjects include Chinese, English, math and a complex subject X (politics, history and geography); for science students, the subjects include Chinese, English, math and a complex subject X (chemistry, physics and biology).