Human Capital Destruction and Economic Performance: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From China's Cultural Revolution

Abstract

This thesis examines the effect that human capital exerts on per worker income, using China's Cultural Revolution as a natural experiment. The decade-long Revolution resulted in severe political persecution of millions among the educated class, and disrupted the schooling of millions more. I exploit cross-provincial variation in political casualties to identify the causal effect of lost human capital on incomes, using both two- and three-stage least squares estimators. My baseline estimates suggest that a one percent decline in human capital accumulation results in income reductions in the order of around 7 percent, which rises as the Revolution progresses, before diminishing in the later years. The finding remains robust to a host of robustness checks, including using alternative variable measures, additional controls, changes to the instrument set, the use of growth rather than levels, and falsification exercises. I also find some evidence that the human capital effect is transmitted more at the secondary and tertiary (rather than primary) levels, and on manufacturing and services, rather than agriculture.