Grants and services provided by the government may crowd out informal arrangements, thus weakening informal caring relations and networks. In this paper, we examine the impact of social security expansion on neighborhood cohesion of elders using China's New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), one of...

Blood collection following nonstandard operations largely increases the risks of infectious diseases through cross-contamination. Commercial plasma donation and the resulting HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C epidemics in central China in the 1990s killed more than one million people. Many blood banks...

The tradition of keeping written records of gift received during household ceremonies in many countries offers researchers an underutilized means of data collection for social network analysis. This paper first summarizes unique features of the gift record data that circumvent five prevailing...

The fetal origins hypothesis (hereafter FOH), put forward in the epidemiological literature and later flourished in the economics literature, suggests that the time in utero is a critical period for human development. However, much attention has been paid to the consequences of fetal exposures...

China launched a pension program for rural residents in 2009, now covering more than 300 million Chinese. This program offers a unique setting for studying the ageing population, given the rapidity of China's population ageing, traditions of filial piety and co-residence, decreasing number of...

Status concern and the feelings of relative deprivation affect individual behavior and well-being. Traditional norms and the alarming inequality in China have made relative deprivation more and more intense for the Chinese population. This paper reviews empirical literature on China that...

Cognitive functioning is critical as in our daily life a host of real-world complex decisions in high-stakes markets have to be made. The decision-making process can be vulnerable to environmental stressors. Summarizing the growing economic and epidemiologic evidence linking air pollution,...

This paper reviews the latest evidence of the effects of early life circumstances on old-age health, distinguishing in utero exposures from childhood exposures to a wide range of environments. We then leverage the growing number of studies of the impact of the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961) on...

Existing studies that evaluate the impact of pollution on human beings understate its negative effect on cognition, mental health, and happiness. This paper attempts to fill in the gap via investigating the impact of air quality on subjective well-being using China as an example. By matching a...

We estimate the impact of receiving pension benefits on mental well-being using China's New Rural Pension Scheme launched in 2010, the largest pension program in the world. More than four hundred million Chinese have enrolled in the program, and the program on average amounts to one fifth of...