Arrival of Young Talent: The Send-down Movement and Rural Education in China: Reply

Chen et al. (2020A) find that the arrival of urban youths during the send-down movement benefited the education of rural children as an unintended consequence. Gong et al. (2020) questioned our results and raised four issues on variable coding, identification, mechanism, and welfare implications. All these four issues are either fully acknowledged or extensively discussed in our paper. Most of the comments or arguments in Gong et al. (2020) rely on anecdotal stories or personal experiences without presenting data-based empirical evidence as a support. Some of them are misleading or simply wrong. In this reply, we will make more clarifications and provide more evidence to show that the four issues raised in Gong et al. (2020) neither invalidate our empirical design nor change our key findings.