Education and Innovation: The Long Shadow of the Cultural Revolution / Zhangkai Huang, Gordon M. Phillips, Jialun Yang, Yi Zhang.

By:

Huang, Zhangkai

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w27107.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: The Cultural Revolution deprived Chinese students of the opportunity to receive higher education for 10 years when colleges and universities were closed from 1966-1976. We examine the human capital cost of this loss of education on subsequent innovation by firms, and ask if it impacted firms more than 30 years later. We examine the innovation of firms with CEOs who turned 18 during the Cultural Revolution, which sharply reduced their chances of attending college. Using multiple approaches to control for selection and endogeneity, including an instrument based on whether the CEO turned 18 during the Cultural Revolution and a regression discontinuity approach, we show that Chinese firms led by CEOs without a college degree spend less on R&D, generate fewer patents, and receive fewer citations to these patents.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w27107 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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May 2020.

The Cultural Revolution deprived Chinese students of the opportunity to receive higher education for 10 years when colleges and universities were closed from 1966-1976. We examine the human capital cost of this loss of education on subsequent innovation by firms, and ask if it impacted firms more than 30 years later. We examine the innovation of firms with CEOs who turned 18 during the Cultural Revolution, which sharply reduced their chances of attending college. Using multiple approaches to control for selection and endogeneity, including an instrument based on whether the CEO turned 18 during the Cultural Revolution and a regression discontinuity approach, we show that Chinese firms led by CEOs without a college degree spend less on R&D, generate fewer patents, and receive fewer citations to these patents.