The Long-Term Health and Economic Consequences of Improved Property Rights

This paper studies the long-term health and economic consequences of China's Household Responsibility System (HRS) reform—a property reform that assigned collectively owned farmland to individual households with secure tenures and boosted labor productivity among rural populations. Using regional variation in reform timing, I provide evidence that the reform significantly improved later-life health, education, and labor market outcomes for individuals who had been exposed early in life. However, it reduced human capital investment for those exposed at critical school ages, making them less likely to receive education and more likely to remain in agriculture