Do college graduates serving as village officials help mitigate income inequality within village?

China has made the remarkable achievements in poverty alleviation, but there remains a great challenge to effectively support disadvantaged farmers and mitigate income inequality. The policy of College Graduates Serving as Village Officials (CGVOs), through which reallocates the high-quality talents mostly from large and medium cities to villages, has not received the deserved attention. In this study, we construct the theoretical framework about how CGVOs mitigate Income Inequality within Village (IIV). With a nationally representative panel data, we use Difference in Difference estimator and identify the impact of CGVOs. Main findings are as follows: (1) CGVOs can help mitigate IIV, mainly reflected in increasing farmers' operating income, property income, and transfer income and targeting the disadvantaged farmers. (2) CGVOs play an important role in optimizing production factor allocation, obtaining external resource support, improving the governance transparency, and increasing farmers' access to public service. (3) CGVOs' functions tend to vary in regional endowments and village secretary's characteristics. Finally, we put forward policy suggestions about how to fully utilize CGVOs' roles, which would shed light on village development in other developing countries. •The novel theoretical framework is constructed to study the function of CGVOs.•CGVOs can help mitigate IIV.•Promoting transparency in governance and increasing access to public services may be two main drivers of CGVOs’ function.•CGVOs' functions vary by regional endowments and village secretary's characteristics.