Korea is well known for its long working hours amongst employees, being always no. 1 or 2 in OECD ranking for average annual hours. Researchers find that the long working hours have detrimental effects on productivity and employees' material well-being such as work-related injuries and illness....

In this paper I examine the impact of firms' political connectedness on firm performance in private listed Chinese firms in the manufacturing sector, exploiting a policy shock, that is, the 4-trillion-yuan ($586-billion) economic stimulus plan in 2009 in response to the 2008 financial crisis. I...

I study the long-term impact of class identity (chengfen) on individuals' income and households' wealth in urban China using Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) data. Chinese government launched movements to make income and consumption in cities substantially homogeneous and assigned an...

In this paper I study whether social capital has an effect on household decisions to participate in Rotating Labor Associations (ROLAs) in rural China. I find that households in communities with higher levels of social capital are more likely to participate in ROLAs using household data...

Subjective well-being has attracted sharply increasing attention among researchers and policy makers in recent years. The public also pays a lot of attention to it, evidenced by the heavy use of the word "happiness" in media. Some researchers argue that subjective well-being measures should...

This paper uses a variety of individual-level survey data from several countries to test for interactions between subjective well-being at different ages and variables measuring the nature and quality of the social context at work, at home, and in the community. While earlier studies have found...

This paper studies how individuals, particularly low-income individuals, have financed housing purchases since the housing market was privatized in urban China in the 1990s. To the surprise of many policy makers and economists, more than 80% of the households in urban China owned private housing...

In this paper we estimate the causal effect of having brothers as compared to having sisters on individuals' happiness in China. To identify the effect, we explore random gender assignment of siblings, conditional on the number of siblings, among urban residents born before the One Child Policy...

This paper uses the China General Social Survey (CGSS) 2003 to evaluate the long-term consequences of a forced migration, the state's “send-down” movement (shang shan xia xiang, or up to the mountains, down to the villages) during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, on individuals' non-material...