The Race for Elite Destinations: Education Competition and Low Fertility in Korea

Abstract

South Korea has the world's lowest fertility and an intense education race. Families devote nine percent of lifetime income to education, mostly to private tutoring with near-zero measured returns. I show that competition for coveted careers generates an assignment externality: when all families spend more, the admission bar rises and children become costly. In a quantitative model calibrated to this mechanism, replacing score-based assignment with a capacity-preserving lottery raises completed fertility by 0.24 children per couple. Pronatal transfers deliver one eighth of that increase. Education taxes deliver almost none. Preference shifts, not a fiercer race, explain the decline across cohorts.