The Study Of Ethnicity Identity On Students' Human Capital Formation

Human capital refers to the sum of quality factors such as physical strength,knowledge and skills with economic value in the human body.It can be divided into health capital,knowledge capital and experience skills.Based on the administrative data of undergraduates in a university and two large micro databases of China,this paper comprehensively evaluates the impact of students' ethnicity identity on human capital knowledge as well as its mechanisms.In the research process,this paper uses educational output indicators such as academic performance and cognitive level to measure students' knowledge capital,focusing on investigating the human capital effect caused by ethnicity identity from the following perspectives: the measurement methods,formation path,time trend and mechanisms.Based on this,we furtherly put forward policy suggestions to promote educational equity in ethnic areas,enhance ethnic unity and harmony,and build a high-quality education system.Among the numerous education effects of students' ethnicity identity,this paper focuses on the following three aspects: first,the intergeneration education effect caused by parental intermarriage and its mechanisms;Second,the ethnic differences of junior middle school students' cognitive level and the contribution of endowment effect;Third,the ethnic disparity,mechanisms and time trend of undergraduates' academic performance.Finally,combined with the background of current macro ethnic minority education policies,this paper provides summary comments and future prospects.The main body of this paper consists of seven chapters,which are carried out by the following logic line: research background,stylized facts,literature review,data cleaning,raising problems,solving problems,summary and discussion.The main contents of each chapter are as follows:The first chapter is the introduction,which provides the research background,research topics,research contents and main innovation of this paper.Under the background that China has basically realized the equality in ethnic education opportunity,how to improve the academic performance of non-Han students,so as to reduce the education output disparity between Han and non-Han students? This is one of the main challenges facing the maintenance of ethnic equality and the construction of high-quality education system.The second chapter is the institutional background,which focuses on the emergence of ethnic groups,China's major ethnic interethnic marriage and education policies.And based on the three micro datasets used in this paper,this paper describes the cognitive level differences between children from intermarriage and non-intermarriage families,ethnic differences in junior middle school students' cognitive level,and the time trend of ethnic differences in undergraduate academic performance,and then puts forward the specific research motivation and questions of this paper.The third chapter is literature review,which systematically reviews and combs the relevant domestic and foreign literature.This paper summarizes the relevant theoretical frameworks,educational effects,economic effects and other social effects of ethnic identity and the determinants of cognitive level,and expounds the main contribution of this paper by refining the shortcomings of existing literature.Meanwhile,referring to the existing literature,intermarriage mainly considers types,i.e.,non-intermarriage and intermarriage while ethnicity identity mainly considers two types,i.e.,Han and non-Han as well.Students' cognitive level is measured by five indicators: GPA,major ranking,CET4,word and math test scores.Based on the perspective of intermarriage,the fourth chapter uses the data of China family panel survey to test the intergeneration education effect of intermarriage.The results show that intermarriage significantly promotes children's cognitive level.The reduction of family fertility scale,the increase in educational investment and the enhancement of children's Chinese use frequency are the key mechanisms for intermarriage to improve children's cognitive level,which explains about 60% of the benchmark effect.However,there is no evidence supporting that the changes of parental education expectation,income level,parenting style and the adjustment of children's time use are also the mechanisms of the benchmark results.The above effects are more significant for children of male,in primary school or with higher math ability.Based on the data of China education panel survey,the fifth chapter analyzes the cognitive level effect of junior middle school students' ethnicity identity.We find that the cognitive level of non-Han students is significantly lower than that of Han students.The difference is furtherly decomposed into "endowment effect" and "structure effect" by OB decomposition method.The results show that nearly half of the cognitive level gap can be explained by the "endowment effect",and the differences of all observable factors account for more than 70% of the "endowment effect".Parental education attainment,head teacher's woring experience and siblings play an evidently stronger role in explaining the "endowment effect" than teachers' quality and school resources.The results of quantile regression and OB decomposition based on recentred influence function regression method show that this gap is particularly significant for students with medium or above cognitive ability.The higher the students' cognitive ability is,the stronger the explanatory power of the differences in observable factors to the "endowment effect" will be.Based on the perspective of education production function,the sixth chapter uses the administrative data of undergraduates in a university to investigate the impact of ethnicity identity on academic performance and its mechanism.The results show that the academic performance of non-Han students is significantly lower than that of Han students.After we distinguish the peer effect at the dormitory level and major level,we find that the peer effect at the dormitory level plays the major role.The average GPA of roommates and cultural distance among them are the main reasons for the academic performance gap between Han and non-Han students.In addition,by analyzing the time trend of the benchmark results,we find that although the ethnic gap in academic performance showing a gradually expanding trend,its growth rate tends to converge.The seventh chapter summarizes the main research contents and conclusions of the full paper,then discusses the corresponding policy implications based on these findings,and points out the limitations and future development direction of this study.The main points of this study can be summarized as follows:(1)for primary and middle school students,intermarriage brings about considerable intergenerational educational benefits.Reducing family fertility,increasing children's Chinese use frequency,and increasing family education investment are the key channels for intermarriage to improve children's cognitive level.(2)In the stage of secondary education,the cognitive level effect of junior middle school students' ethnicity identity always exists.Half of the difference can be explained by the "endowment effect",and the difference of observable factors explains more than70% of the "endowment effect".Among them,Parental education attainment,head teacher's woring experience and family background explain more of the benchmark gap than teachers' quality and school resources.(3)In the stage of higher education,the ethnic disparity in undergraduate' academic performance can be reduced by improving the average score of roommates or reducing the cultural distance between roommates.Although the academic performance of non-Han undergraduates is significantly lower than that of Han students is always existing and this gap gradually expands with the year and semester,its growth rate tends to converge(i.e.,the acceleration tends to zero).The contribution of this paper is mainly reflected in two aspects: research perspective innovation and research method innovation.1.Research perspective innovation.Firstly,although there is abundant literature on the social effects of intermarriage,there is a few literatures on the intergeneration effects of intermarriage.These studies lack the evaluation of the educational effects of intermarriage.Several studies that directly evaluate the educational effect of intermarriage also ignoring the endogenous problem and mechanism tests.In view of this,this paper identifies the causal relationship between intermarriage and children's cognitive level,and comprehensively explains the benchmark results from the perspectives of family fertility scale,parentsal education expectations,parenting style,education investment,children's time use and language use.Secondly,although lots of studies have examined the cognitive level effect caused by ethnicity identity,these literatures mainly investigate the ethnicity differences in students' test scores.Meanwhile,it is very rare to measure and compare the contributions of five types of cognitive level determinants,i.e.,students' individual characteristics,parents' participation,family background,teachers' quality and school resources.In this paper,children's non-classroom knowledge,i.e.,words and math ability are used to measure cognitive level.We also compare the explanation power of different factors to the benchmark results,which is a useful supplement to current literature.Finally,although mainly based on the theory of educational production function and human capital theory,the existing literature has carried out rich research on the socio-economic effects caused by ethnicity identity,there is also a numerous of studies measuring children's academic performance from different perspectives and investigate its determinants.However,on the one hand,the domestic research on the education effect of ethnicity identity is still blank,and there is a lack of empirical evidence on this topic in a multi-ethnic and populous country like China.On the other hand,although plenty of foreign studies have evaluated the impact of students' ethnicity identity on academic performance,most of them are limited to the effect of racial education in the sense of skin color,ignoring the ethnic differences based on specific customs,language,and cultural concepts.By introducing peer effect,this paper explains the mechanisms and dynamic trend of undergraduate ethnicity identity on academic performance.Through mechanism analysis,this paper obtains the following new viewpoints.Firstly,there are limited literatures studying the impact of intermarriage on children's cognitive level,and these literatures mainly focus on the existence of intergenerational education effect of intermarriage.Only one study explains the benchmark results from the structural difference of education system.This paper makes plenty of mechanism tests from the aspects of parental expectation,family fertility scale,income level,education investment,parenting style,children's time use and language use.We find that the secret of intermarriage improving children's cognitive level lies in the reduction of family fertility scale,the increase of educational investment and the increase of children's Chinese use frequency.These three mechanisms explain about 60% of the benchmark effect in total.However,there is no evidence supporting that parental education expectation,income level,parenting style and children's time use are also the mechanisms of benchmark results.Secondly,when investigating the ethnic differences in academic performance,the traditional literature emphasizes the role of individual characteristics,early investment,family background,school quality and external environment.This paper makes a new interpretation of the benchmark results from the perspective of peer effect.Results show that the higher the average score of roommates or the smaller the cultural distance among roommates is,the more helpful it is to narrow the ethnic minority gap in academic performance.2.Research method innovation.Firstly,when investigating the intergeneration effect of intermarriage,the OLS estimation may be biased due to the potential measurement error and omitted variable problem.In order to overcome the endogeneity,this paper improves the instrumental variable used in the traditional literature-ethnic scale,that is,the proportion of a specific ethnic group(minority or Han)in the total population in the region.The existing literature mainly uses the proportion of the heterosexual population of the individual's ethnic group in the total population of the ethnic group to measure the ethnic scale.This paper uses the proportion of the heterosexual population of the same ethnic group in the total population of the county at the county level in history to measure the ethnic scale.This is conducive to furtherly exclude the defiers behind IV variables under the background of domestic migrants.Secondly,traditional literature mainly adopts the OB decomposition method which is based on OLS regression to decompose the ethnic differences in students' cognitive level into "endowment effect" and "structural effect",and discusses the relative importance of each observable factor.However,the limitation of this method is that it can only decompose the mean difference of the dependent variable on observable factors and can not investigate the decomposition results of the quantile differences of dependent variables.Therefore,this is the first study to estimate the statistics of cognitive level at each main quantile by recentered influence function(RIF)regression method,and then carries out Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition based on the fitting values of these quantile statistics.Based on RIF-OB decomposition method,we can furtherly investigate the explanatory effect of observable characteristic differences on the quantile differences of dependent variable.