China launched a new rural pension scheme (hereafter NRPS) for rural residents in 2009, now covering almost all counties with over 400 million people enrolled. This implementation of the largest social pension program in the world offers a unique setting for studying the economics of...

The transition in the People's Republic of China from a centrally planned economy to a market-based economy is widely acclaimed for leading to unprecedented economic growth, but there is a growing awareness of the social strains accompanying that growth such as the lagging development of the...

In one of the first studies of service sector robotics using establishment-level data, we study the impact of robots on staffing in Japanese nursing homes, using geographic variation in robot subsidies as an instrumental variable. We find that robot adoption increases employment by augmenting...