Education burden reduction, family education investment, and education equity

Abstract

How to effectively reduce the burden of students has received widespread attention in recent years. A series of burden reduction policies have been issued, yet there exists large dispute over the effectiveness of these policies. To assess the impact of the burden reduction policies, we construct a theoretical model and test its hypotheses with the constructed policy index and micro-level information from the CFPS dataset. We find that the burden reduction policies implemented during 2005–2018 were generally ineffective, but enlarged the difference in both family education investments and education output between students from high and low income families.