The purpose of economic reform is to reduce distortions and enhance efficiency. However, when reforms are partial and incremental, individuals and local governments are often able to capture the rent inherent in the gradual transition process. Young (2000) warned that such rent-seeking behavior...

As sex ratio imbalances have become a problem in an increasing number of countries, it is important to understand their consequences. With the defeat of the Kuomintang Party in China, more than one million soldiers and civilians, mainly young males, retreated to Taiwan in the late 1940s....

Rural non-farm development plays a key role in generating employment in many developing countries. Clustering is an important industrial organization in the rural non-farm sector. Based on primary surveys of both urban and rural handloom weaver clusters in Ethiopia which took place in May/June...

During the period of Nepal's ninth Five-Year Plan (1997–2002), agricultural growth in the predominantly rural society was disappointing. The recent peace process, however, gives the country new opportunities to develop its economy with less interference due to internal conflict. This research...

This paper develops a method for decomposing the contributions of various types of public investment on regional inequality and applies the method to rural China. Public investments are found to have contributed to production growth in both the agricultural and rural non-agricultural sectors,...

In this paper, we argue that economists can learn a great deal from the design principles implemented in medical research. We develop a theoretical model to show the logic of adaptive sequential experiment design in the presence of uncertainty over negative effects and discuss how to choose...

Participating in and presenting gifts at funerals, weddings, and other ceremonies held by fellow villagers have been regarded as social norms in Chinese villages for thousands of years. However, it is more burdensome for the poor to take part in these social occasions than for the rich. Because...

The intergenerational effect of fetal exposure to malnutrition on cognitive ability has rarely been studied for human beings in large part due to lack of data. In this paper, we exploit a natural experiment, the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961, and employ a novel dataset, the China...