摘要
我国人口出生率的持续下降正在成为经济发展的重要挑战。本文使用双重差分法估计我国1999年的大学扩招政策对个体婚姻和生育决策的影响。结果表明,平均而言,大学扩招使得初次结婚和生育的年龄分别推迟了1.28年和1.63年,但对生育数量并没有造成显著的影响,这一结论在不同设定下保持稳健。扩招政策对婚育年龄的推迟效果,既包括“禁闭效应”--延长了在校学习的时长,又包括“人力资本效应”--提高了个人的时间成本、改善了女性的就业机会,以及增加孩子的养育成本、提高配偶的学历要求等其他作用机制。而扩招政策对生育数量影响的不显著,可能是“替代效应”和“收入效应”共同作用的结果。扩招带来的影响在不同群组之间存在异质性,高收入和城市户口群体显著减少了生育的数量、推迟了婚育年龄,而低收入和农村户口群体的生育数量并没有显著变化,其婚育年龄的推迟效果也较弱。本文粗略估计认为,扩招政策分别解释了1990-2017年我国育龄女性平均初婚和初育年龄推迟的36%和47%。
Low fertility has come to be a challenge in China.This paper uses Difference-in-Difference to investigate the causal impact of college enrollment expansion on marriage and reproduction.The results show that,on average,the expansion postpones the age of first marriage and childbearing by 1.28 and 1.63 years respectively,but has no effect on fertility.These results are robust under different settings.The delay effect includes“incarceration effect”(an extension of time in school),“human capital effect”(an increase in time cost and an improvement of women's employment opportunity)and other mechanism(an increase in the cost of raising children and in the need for better educated spouse).The coexistence of“substitution effect”and“income effect”may be the reason why the expansion has no effect on fertility number.We also find heterogeneous effects in different groups.More specifically,high income and urban hukou group significantly decrease their fertility and postpone the age of first marriage and childbearing,while the effect on low income and rural hukou group is small.The average age of first marriage and childbearing of Chinese women,who are in their childbearing age,delay by 4.3 and 3.4 years during 1990-2017.Our back of the envelope calculation suggests that college enrollment expansion can explain 36%and 47%,respectively.
作者
葛润
黄家林
Run Ge;Jialin Huang(School of Economics and Management,Tsinghua University;National School of Development,Peking University)
出处
《经济学报》
CSSCI
2020年第3期168-201,共34页
China Journal of Economics
