We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economic- and TFP growth in China. Ourresults show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of severalinterrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, andinfrastructure capital; the infusion of...

We estimate the effects of early childhood malaria exposure on education and health at older ages by exploiting variations in malaria exposure risk around birth that resulted from a universal malaria eradication campaign in colonial Taiwan in the early 20th century. We find that malaria exposure...

We find that second-generation effects of in utero and early childhood malnutrition on the school participation of the offspring of mothers who experienced the China Great Leap Forward Famine. The direct impact on entrance to senior high school is also negative, but smaller in magnitude than...

Industry mean wages in China have exhibited sharply increased dispersion since the early 1990s. The upward trend in differences of average wages among major industry groups parallels increases in wage and income inequality not only between rural and urban sectors but within the urban economy as...

Intangible knowledge capital (IKC) – technology produced by workers but not embodied in them – can offset the "middle income trap" as China exhausts the benefits of international technology transfer. IKC is productivity-enhancing among Chinese enterprises – more so in domestically owned...

We investigate the role of factor-priced-induced innovation in mediating the employment impact of expanding production in China. Our empirical approach implements concepts developed in Acemoglu (2010) and complements the approaches summarized by Wei, Xie, and Zhang (2017) that focus on directly...

We apply a semi-parametric latent variable model to estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of private returns to schooling for college graduates during China's reform between 1988 and 2002. We find that there were substantial sorting gains under the traditional system, but they...

The impact of socio-economic status on health has been widely recognized, but the independent impact of social status alone on health remains inconclusive. We approach this challenge by exploiting a natural experiment in which subjects undergo a shift in their social status without considerable...

We report evidence of long-term adverse health impacts of in utero exposure to malnutrition based on survivors in their 50s who were born during the China Famine that occurred in the years 1959-1961. We take advantage of recently available data provided by the China Health and Retirement...

Using data from CHIPS 1995-2013, we find polarization of employment from middle-income Skilled jobs to work in the Unskilled and Self-Employment job categories. This redistribution of employment is consistent with the automation of routine noncognitive tasks in the skilled sector as analyzed in...