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Author: Zhou, Xiang
Resulting in 10 citations.
1. Ahearn, Caitlin
Brand, Jennie E.
Zhou, Xiang
How, and For Whom, Does Higher Education Increase Voting?
Research in Higher Education published online (14 September 2022): DOI: 10.1007/s11162-022-09717-4.
Also: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11162-022-09717-4
Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: Springer
Keyword(s): College Enrollment; Higher Education; Voting Behavior

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The college-educated are more likely to vote than are those with less education. Prior research suggests that the effect of college attendance on voting operates directly, by increasing an individual's interest and engagement in politics through social networks or human capital accumulation. College may also increase voting indirectly by leading to degree attainment and increasing socioeconomic status, thus facilitating political participation. However, few studies have empirically tested these direct and indirect pathways or examined how these effects vary across individuals. To bridge this gap, we employ a nonparametric causal mediation analysis to examine the total, direct, and indirect effects of college attendance on voting and how these effects differ across individuals with different propensities of attending college. Using data from the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, we find large direct effects of college on self-reported voting and comparably smaller indirect effects that operate through degree completion and socioeconomic attainment. We find the largest impact of college on voting for individuals unlikely to attend, a pattern due primarily to heterogeneity in the direct effect of college. Our findings suggest that civic returns to college are not contingent upon degree completion or socioeconomic returns. An exclusive focus on the economic returns to college can mask the broader societal benefits of expanding higher education to disadvantaged youth.
Bibliography Citation
Ahearn, Caitlin, Jennie E. Brand and Xiang Zhou. "How, and For Whom, Does Higher Education Increase Voting?" Research in Higher Education published online (14 September 2022): DOI: 10.1007/s11162-022-09717-4.
2. Bloome, Deirdre
Dyer, Shauna
Zhou, Xiang
Educational Inequality, Educational Expansion, and Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States
Presented: Chicago IL, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April 2017
Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): Educational Attainment; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mobility, Economic

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

How has intergenerational income mobility remained stable in the United States while educational inequalities have risen? Scholars predicted that mobility would decline as college graduates became increasingly likely to have higher-income parents and higher-income adult families than people without college degrees. We show that mobility remained stable because rising educational inequalities were offset by two factors. First, because mobility is highest among college graduates, educational expansion---more people completing college, whatever their parents' income---increased income mobility. Second, non-educational pathways linking parents' and children's incomes weakened. We introduce new methods to connect trends in intergenerational income mobility, educational inequality, and educational expansion. Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, 1979 and 1997 cohorts, we reveal that massive educational expansion only partially offset rising educational inequality. Income mobility remained stable across cohorts because educational expansion and non-educational change---including delayed transitions to adulthood---put upward pressure on mobility.
Bibliography Citation
Bloome, Deirdre, Shauna Dyer and Xiang Zhou. "Educational Inequality, Educational Expansion, and Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States." Presented: Chicago IL, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April 2017.
3. Bloome, Deirdre
Dyer, Shauna
Zhou, Xiang
Educational Inequality, Educational Expansion, and Intergenerational Income Persistence in the United States
American Sociological Review 83,6 (December 2018): 1215-1253.
Also: ttps://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122418809374
Cohort(s): NLSY79, NLSY97
Publisher: American Sociological Association
Keyword(s): Educational Attainment; Educational Returns; Family Income; Income; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mobility, Economic

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The children of high-income parents often become high-income adults, while their low-income peers often become low-income adults. Education plays a central role in this intergenerational income persistence. Because education-based inequalities grew in recent decades, many scholars predicted that intergenerational income persistence would increase. However, previous research suggests that it remained stable across recent cohorts. We address this puzzle. Analyzing National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth data, we find that growing educational inequality by parental income, along with rising economic returns to education, increased intergenerational persistence, as scholars expected. However, two countervailing trends offset this increase. The expansion of higher education reduced persistence, because completing college helps low-income children become high-income adults. Yet, this reduction in persistence was far from enough to offset the increase in persistence associated with growing educational inequality and rising educational returns. Intergenerational persistence would have increased if not for another change: within educational groups, parental income became less predictive of adult income. New methodological tools underlie these findings, tools that quantify, for the first time, education's full force in intergenerational income persistence. These findings suggest that to reduce intergenerational persistence, educational policies should focus less on how many people complete college and more on who completes college.
Bibliography Citation
Bloome, Deirdre, Shauna Dyer and Xiang Zhou. "Educational Inequality, Educational Expansion, and Intergenerational Income Persistence in the United States." American Sociological Review 83,6 (December 2018): 1215-1253.
4. Cheng, Siwei
Brand, Jennie E.
Zhou, Xiang
Xie, Yu
Who Benefits First? Whose Benefits Last? Economic Returns on College Over the Life Cycle
Presented: Denver CO, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April 2018
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): College Degree; Earnings; Educational Returns; Life Cycle Research; Propensity Scores

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Most prior research on the college premium focuses on earnings at a certain age or averaged across the lifetime. We believe, however, that there are three important reasons for considering these college returns as varying over the life cycle. First, the economic benefits of college may emerge slowly rather than instantaneously over the career, therefore, college may be associated with a higher initial earnings as well as faster earnings growth rate. Second, individuals with varying propensity of attending college may also reap the returns to college at different life stages, which leads to the heterogeneity in the college premium across the propensity spectrum. Third, the life cycle variations in college premium may further depend on family and personal characteristics. Applying propensity-score based methods to data from NLSY79, our preliminary findings show that these three arguments are supported by empirical evidence in the United States.
Bibliography Citation
Cheng, Siwei, Jennie E. Brand, Xiang Zhou and Yu Xie. "Who Benefits First? Whose Benefits Last? Economic Returns on College Over the Life Cycle." Presented: Denver CO, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April 2018.
5. Cheng, Siwei
Brand, Jennie E.
Zhou, Xiang
Xie, Yu
Hout, Michael
Heterogeneous Returns to College over the Life Course
Science Advances 7,51 (15 December 2021): DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg7641.
Also: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg7641
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Science
Keyword(s): College Graduates; High School Completion/Graduates; Modeling, Growth Curve/Latent Trajectory Analysis; Propensity Scores; Wages

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

College graduates earn higher wages than high school graduates by age 30. Among women, the advantages of a college degree decline somewhat as they age, although they are still substantial at age 50; for men, the advantage of a college degree grows throughout the life cycle. Most previous research on returns to higher education has focused on income at a single point in time or averaged over multiple years; our contribution is to study how returns vary by age. We also document how these patterns vary by the propensity of graduating from college. We find modest wage returns for mid-propensity college graduates, but large returns for low-propensity and, for men, high-propensity college graduates. Our results rely on propensity score-based matching combined with multilevel growth curve models applied to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort.
Bibliography Citation
Cheng, Siwei, Jennie E. Brand, Xiang Zhou, Yu Xie and Michael Hout. "Heterogeneous Returns to College over the Life Course." Science Advances 7,51 (15 December 2021): DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg7641.
6. Zhou, Xiang
Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College: A Causal Mediation Approach
Sociological Methods and Research published online (1 August 2022): DOI: 10.1177/00491241221113876.
Also: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00491241221113876
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: Sage Publications
Keyword(s): College Education; Disadvantaged, Economically; Earnings; Educational Returns; Heterogeneity

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

A growing body of social science research investigates whether the economic payoff to a college education is heterogeneous -- in particular, whether disadvantaged youth can benefit more from attending and completing college relative to their more advantaged peers. Scholars, however, have employed different analytical strategies and reported mixed findings. To shed light on this literature, I propose a causal mediation approach to conceptualizing, evaluating, and unpacking the causal effects of college on earnings. By decomposing the total effect of attending a four-year college into several direct and indirect components, this approach not only clarifies the mechanisms through which college attendance boosts earnings, but illuminates the ways in which the postsecondary system may be both an equalizer and a stratifier. The total effect of college attendance, its direct and indirect components, and their heterogeneity across different subpopulations are all identified under the assumption of sequential ignorability. I introduce a debiased machine learning (DML) method for estimating all quantities of interest, along with a set of bias formulas for sensitivity analysis. I illustrate the proposed framework and methodology using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort.
Bibliography Citation
Zhou, Xiang. "Attendance, Completion, and Heterogeneous Returns to College: A Causal Mediation Approach." Sociological Methods and Research published online (1 August 2022): DOI: 10.1177/00491241221113876.
7. Zhou, Xiang
Equalization or Selection? Reassessing the "Meritocratic Power" of a College Degree in Intergenerational Income Mobility
American Sociological Review 84,3 (June 2019): 459-485.
Also: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122419844992
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: American Sociological Association
Keyword(s): College Graduates; Income; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mobility; Mobility, Economic

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Intergenerational mobility is higher among college graduates than among people with lower levels of education. In light of this finding, researchers have characterized a college degree as a great equalizer leveling the playing field, and proposed that expanding higher education would promote mobility. This line of reasoning rests on the implicit assumption that the relatively high mobility observed among college graduates reflects a causal effect of college completion on intergenerational mobility, an assumption that has rarely been rigorously evaluated. This article bridges this gap. Using a novel reweighting technique, I estimate the degree of intergenerational income mobility among college graduates purged of selection processes that may drive up observed mobility in this subpopulation. Analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I find that once selection processes are adjusted for, intergenerational income mobility among college graduates is very close to that among non-graduates. This finding suggests that expanding the pool of college graduates per se is unlikely to boost intergenerational income mobility in the United States. To promote mobility, public investments in higher education (e.g., federal and state student aid programs) should be targeted at low-income youth.
Bibliography Citation
Zhou, Xiang. "Equalization or Selection? Reassessing the "Meritocratic Power" of a College Degree in Intergenerational Income Mobility." American Sociological Review 84,3 (June 2019): 459-485.
8. Zhou, Xiang
Pan, Guanghui
Higher Education and the Black-White Earnings Gap
Presented: Atlanta GA, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April 2022
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): College Education; Racial Equality/Inequality; Wage Gap

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

We employ a novel causal decomposition, along with a debiased machine learning method for estimation, to isolate the equalizing and disequalizing effects of college on the black-white earnings gap and unveil the sources of these effects. Analyzing data from the NLSY97, we find that among men, the attainment of a BA degree has a strong equalizing effect on earnings in their early thirties, but this equalizing effect is blunted by a disequalizing effect associated with unequal likelihoods of BA completion. To illuminate the policy implications of our findings, we estimate counterfactual black-white earnings gaps under a set of idealized educational interventions. We find that only interventions that both boost rates of college attendance and BA completion and close racial disparities in these transitions can substantially reduce the black-white earnings gap.
Bibliography Citation
Zhou, Xiang and Guanghui Pan. "Higher Education and the Black-White Earnings Gap." Presented: Atlanta GA, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April 2022.
9. Zhou, Xiang
Pan, Guanghui
Higher Education and the Black-White Earnings Gap
American Sociological Review published online (27 January 2023): DOI:10.1177/00031224221141887.
Also: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00031224221141887
Cohort(s): NLSY97
Publisher: American Sociological Association
Keyword(s): College Degree; Racial Equality/Inequality; Wage Gap

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

How does higher education shape the Black-White earnings gap? It may help close the gap if Black youth benefit more from attending and completing college than do White youth. On the other hand, Black college-goers are less likely to complete college relative to White students, and this disparity in degree completion helps reproduce racial inequality. In this study, we use a novel causal decomposition and a debiased machine learning method to isolate, quantify, and explain the equalizing and stratifying roles of college. Analyzing data from the NLSY97, we find that a bachelor's degree has a strong equalizing effect on earnings among men (albeit not among women); yet, at the population level, this equalizing effect is partly offset by unequal likelihoods of bachelor's completion between Black and White students. Moreover, a bachelor's degree narrows the male Black-White earnings gap not by reducing the influence of class background and pre-college academic ability, but by lessening the "unexplained" penalty of being Black in the labor market. To illuminate the policy implications of our findings, we estimate counterfactual earnings gaps under a series of stylized educational interventions. We find that interventions that both boost rates of college attendance and bachelor's completion and close racial disparities in these transitions can substantially reduce the Black-White earnings gap.
Bibliography Citation
Zhou, Xiang and Guanghui Pan. "Higher Education and the Black-White Earnings Gap." American Sociological Review published online (27 January 2023): DOI:10.1177/00031224221141887.
10. Zhou, Xiang
Xie, Yu
Propensity Score-based Methods Versus MTE-based Methods in Causal Inference: Identification, Estimation, and Application
Sociological Methods and Research 45,1 (February 2016): 3-40.
Also: http://smr.sagepub.com/content/45/1/3
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Sage Publications
Keyword(s): College Education; Educational Returns; Modeling, Instrumental Variables; Propensity Scores

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Since the seminal introduction of the propensity score (PS) by Rosenbaum and Rubin, PS-based methods have been widely used for drawing causal inferences in the behavioral and social sciences. However, the PS approach depends on the ignorability assumption: there are no unobserved confounders once observed covariates are taken into account. For situations where this assumption may be violated, Heckman and his associates have recently developed a novel approach based on marginal treatment effects (MTEs). In this article, we (1) explicate the consequences for PS-based methods when aspects of the ignorability assumption are violated, (2) compare PS-based methods and MTE-based methods by making a close examination of their identification assumptions and estimation performances, (3) apply these two approaches in estimating the economic return to college using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) of 1979 and discuss their discrepancies in results. When there is a sorting gain but no systematic baseline difference between treated and untreated units given observed covariates, PS-based methods can identify the treatment effect of the treated (TT). The MTE approach performs best when there is a valid and strong instrumental variable (IV). In addition, this article introduces the "smoothing-difference PS-based method," which enables us to uncover heterogeneity across people of different PSs in both counterfactual outcomes and treatment effects.
Bibliography Citation
Zhou, Xiang and Yu Xie. "Propensity Score-based Methods Versus MTE-based Methods in Causal Inference: Identification, Estimation, and Application." Sociological Methods and Research 45,1 (February 2016): 3-40.