Empirical Study On The Impact Of Education Expansion On Income Distribution Gap In China

Becker's human capital theory holds that education has an impact on income,and education expansion often has an impact on income distribution through education distribution and the rate of return on education.With the increase of the degree of education expansion in China,its impact on the income distribution gap has caused widespread concern,but the research in this area is not very rich and there are inconsistent judgments.Pay attention to the changes in education expansion,education distribution,and the rate of return on education in China,as well as its' impact on income distribution,the structural effect and price effect decomposed by wage inequality plays an important role on understanding the influence mechanism of education expansion on income distribution in China and allocating education resources in a reasonable way to reduce the income distribution gap.This paper sorts out the relevant theory and empirical literature at home and abroad,and uses the micro-panel data of CHNS from 1989 to 2015 to conduct research.We have specifically studied the changes of education expansion,education distribution and the rate of return on education in China,used the two intermediate variables of education distribution and education return rate to analyze the impact of education expansion on the income distribution gap,and used the FFL decomposition method to decompose wage income inequality into structural effect and price effect based on the perspective of effect decomposition,so as to comprehensively and profoundly explore the impact mechanism.The main contents and judgments obtained are:First,during the inspection period,China's education expansion continued to increase,education inequality decreased,and the income distribution gap showed a trend of expanding first and then shrinking,but these indicators have a certain degree of urban-rural differences and eastern and western differences.Second,the impact of education expansion on the income distribution gap has an inverted U-shaped relationship and is lagging.Education expansion reduces the degree of educational inequality.The reduction of education inequality negatively affects the income distribution gap,and there is an intermediary effect.The rate of return on private education is on the rise,and the rate of return on higher education rises faster than the rate of return on lower education,it could widen the income distribution gap.Third,wage inequality can be decomposed into the structural effect and price effect of education expansion.From 2004 to 2015,the structural effect is negative(positive for low-income groups and negative for high-income groups),and the price effect is positive and much greater than the structural effect.The net effect is positive.To this end,this article puts forward policy recommendations such as continuing education expansion,focusing on education equity,coordinated development,accelerating the cultivation of highly skilled personnel,and improving the credit market.Compared with similar literatures,this article has made some new progress in two aspects.One is that different from some scholars who only study the impact of education distribution or education return on income distribution,this paper combines these two variables and further decomposes the wage inequality into the structural effect and price effect of education expansion,has a deeper understanding of the mechanism both theoretically and empirically.The second is to directly use individual micro-data to calculate,avoiding the bias due to improper processing of grouped income data.In addition,Heckman's two-stage method,semi-parametric estimation and other methods were used to optimize the calculation of related indicators.In specific analysis,similar results were obtained by using different models and variables,which greatly enhanced the robustness of the results.