On the eve of its economic reforms, China achieved a much higher level of secondary education than other countries with a similar per capita income at the time. This study investigates the pre-reform formation of China's human capital by examining a massive rural education expansion program...

Health insurance in the United States for the working age population has traditionally been provided in the form of employer-sponsored health insurance (ESHI). If employers offered ESHI to their employees, they also typically extended coverage to their spouse and dependents. Provisions in the...

China introduced its stringent family planning policies from the early 1970s, known as the “Later, Longer, Fewer" policies, and followed it with the One-Child Policy from 1979. The number of children born to Chinese parents significantly decreased from 5.7 in late 1960s to 2.5 in 1988. In Chen...

Gong et al. (2021) made additional challenges to our original paper (Chen et al., 2020A) after we made a detailed reply in Chen et al. (2021) to Gong et al. (2020). In this further reply, we use data-based evidence to demonstrate how Gong et al. (2021) misread or/and misinterpreted our paper and...

An incumbent employee competes against a new hire for bonus or promotion. The incumbent's ability is commonly known, while that of the new hire is private information.The incumbent is subject to a perceptional bias: His prior about the new hire's type differs from the true underlying...

We quantify the causal impact of human mobility restrictions, particularly the lockdown of the city of Wuhan on January 23, 2020, on the containment and delay of the spread of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV). We employ a set of difference-in-differences (DID) estimations to disentangle the...

Collateral-based monetary policy tools have been used extensively by major central banks. Lack of proper policy counterfactuals, however, makes it difficult to empirically identify their causal effects on the financial market and the real economy. We exploit a quasi-natural experiment in China,...

Family planning plays a central role in contemporary population policies. However, little is known about its long-term consequences in old age because of the identification challenge. In this study, we examine how family planning affects the quality of life of the Chinese elderly. The direction...

Reverse mortgages provide an alternative source of retirement funding by allowing older homeowners to borrow against their home. However, a recent pilot program of reserve mortgage products in several large Chinese cities saw almost no take up. To ascertain the demand for reverse mortgages in...