We estimate the wage premium associated with having a cadre parent in China using a recent survey of college graduates carried out by the authors. The wage premium of having a cadre parent is 15 percent, and this premium cannot be explained by other observables such as college entrance exam...

To examine poverty on China's campuses, we utilize the Chinese College Students Survey carried out in 2010. With poverty line defined as the college-specific expenditures a student needs to maintain the basic living standard on campus, we find that 22 percent of college students in China are...

We estimate the return to attending elite colleges in China using 2010 data on fresh college graduates. We find that the gross return to attending elite colleges is as high as 26.4 percent, but this figure declines to 10.7 percent once we control for student ability, major, college location,...

Using data from China's Urban Household Survey and exploiting China's mandatory retirement policy, we use the regression discontinuity approach to estimate the impact of retirement on household non-durable expenditures. Retirement reduces total non-durable expenditures by about 21 percent. Among...

This paper estimates the returns to membership of the Chinese Communist Party using unique twins data we collected from China. Our OLS estimate shows that being a Party member increases earnings by 10%, but the within-twin-pair estimate becomes zero. One interpretation of these results is that...

Testing the tradeoff between child quantity and quality within a family is complicated by the endogeneity of family size. Using data from the Chinese Population Census, this paper examines the effect of family size on child educational attainment in China. We find a negative correlation between...

In this paper, we use new survey data on twins born in urban China, among whom many experienced the consequences of the forced mass rustication movement of the Chinesecultural revolution,ʺ to identify the distinct roles of altruism and guilt in affecting behavior within families. Based on a...