This paper documents the value of teacher education by comparing the effectiveness of traditionally and non-traditionally trained teachers. We utilize the unique data from a top school district in China and cross-subject models to address teacher-student sorting bias. Our results indicate that,...

This paper investigates the effects of China’s Free Teacher Education (FTE) program on recruiting prospective teachers in a rural and highly racially diverse province, Ningxia. We employ administrative data on all high school graduates in Ningxia from 2003 to 2018 to examine the trends of...

While it is well known that there are systematic birth order effects on life cycle outcomes, there is less consensus about underlying channels and mechanisms of birth order effects. We find negative birth order effects among Chinese adolescents, favoring earlier-born children within household in...

Subjective performance evaluation is widely used by firms and governments to provide work incentives. However, delegating evaluation power to senior leadership could induce influence activities: agents might devote much efforts to please their supervisors, rather than focusing on productive...

This study estimates the effect of improved bureaucrat quality on poverty alleviation by exploring a unique human capital reallocation policy in China – the “College Graduate Village Officials” (CGVOs) program. We find that introducing CGVOs into the village governance system improves the...

While it is well known that there are systematic birth order effects on life cycle outcomes, there is less consensus about underlying channels and mechanisms of birth order effects. We ftnd negative birth order effects among Chinese adolescents, favoring earlier-born children within household in...

Many governments have engaged in policy experimentation in various forms to resolve uncertainty and facilitate learning. However, little is understood about the characteristics of policy experimentation, and how the structure of experimentation may affect policy learning and policy outcomes. We...