Transfer Paths and Academic Performance: The Primary School Merger Program in China

In this paper, the overall goal is to examine the impact of the Rural Primary School Merger Program on academic performance of students using a dataset from a survey that we designed to reflect transfer paths and boarding statuses of students. OLS and Propensity Score Matching approaches are used and demonstrate that there is a large ?resource effect? (that is, an effect that appears to be associated with the better facilities and higher quality of teachers in the town and county schools) that appears to be associated with the transfers of students from less centralized schools (such as, village schools) to more centralized schools. Boarding, however, is shown to have negative impacts on academic performance. URL:[http://www.econ.kuleuven.be/licos/DP/DP2011/DP282.pdf].