  Global trends of fertility decline, population aging, and rural outmigration
are creating pressures to consolidate school systems, with the rationale that
economies of scale will enable higher quality education to be delivered in an
efficient manner, despite longer travel distances for students. Yet, few
studies have considered the implications of system consolidation for
educational access and inequality, outside of the context of developed
countries. We estimate the impact of educational infrastructure consolidation
on educational attainment using the case of China's rural primary school
closure policies in the early 2000s. We use data from a large household survey
covering 728 villages in 7 provinces, and exploit variation in villages' year
of school closure and children's ages at closure to identify the causal impact
of school closure. For girls exposed to closure during their primary school
ages, we find an average decrease of 0.60 years of schooling by 2011, when
children's mean age was 17 years old. Negative effects strengthen with time
since closure. For boys, there is no corresponding significant effect.
Different effects by gender may be related to greater sensitivity of girls'
enrollment to distance and greater responsiveness of boys' enrollment to
quality.
