Professor Liu Chengfang's team published a paper in the Economics of Education Review

Release date：2022/11/07　　Source： CCAP

    On November 3, 2022, The international academic journal Economics of Education Review published online the research paper "Health benefits of having more female: Quasi-experimental evidence from China " by Professor Liu Chengfang, deputy dean of the School of Advanced Agriculture Sciences of Peking University and director of China Center Agricultural Policy, and her team.

    Based on the panel data of China Education Tracking Survey (CEPS), this paper uses the natural experiment formed by the "random class placement" of the sample schools when the students enter the first year of junior high school to study the impact of the proportion of girls among the classmates on the physical health of the middle school students. The study found that having more female classmates has a significant positive impact on adolescent health indicators such as BmiAZ, HAZ and vision. This positive effect may stem from the fact that having more female classmates helps reduce health risk behaviors among students. Group analysis based on students' household registration and stay-behind status shows that the above influence is mainly driven by female classmates in the same group. Heterogeneity analysis showed that the positive effect was more significant for boys, students from families with less educated parents, rural schools or schools with larger class sizes.

    Yuhe Guo, a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Advanced Agriculture Sciences of Peking University, is the lead author of the work, and her co-supervisor, Professor Chengfang Liu, is the corresponding author of the paper. Shaoping Li, Huzhou Normal University, and Siwei Chen and Yalin Tang, PhD candidates at the School of Advanced Agriculture Sciences of Peking University, are co-authors of the paper. The research results were supported by the Outstanding Youth Foundation of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Reference source：Guo, Yuhe, Shaoping Li, Siwei Chen, Yalin Tang, Chengfang Liu*. 2022. Health Benefits of Having More Female Classmates: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from China. Economics of Education Review 91(2022), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2022.102330.

The full text links：https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775722001030