Since the introduction of the one-child policy in China in 1979, many more boys than girls have been born, foreshadowing a sizable bride shortage. What do young men unable to find wives do? This paper focuses on criminality, an asocial activity that has seen a marked rise since the mid-1990s....

We use survey data on twins in urban China, among whom many experienced the consequences of the forced mass rustication movement of the Cultural Revolution, to identify the roles of altruism, favoritism, and guilt in affecting family behavior. We exploit the fact that many families were forced...

This paper estimates the effects of maternal malnutrition exploiting the 1959-1961 Chinese famine as a natural experiment. In the 1% sample of the 2000 Chinese Census, we find that fetal exposure to acute maternal malnutrition had compromised a range of socioeconomic outcomes, including:...

Spousal education is correlated with earnings for two reasons: cross-productivity between couples and assortative mating. This article empirically disentangles the two effects by using Chinese twins data. We have two innovations: using twins data to control for the unobserved mating effect in...