This paper empirically estimates the returns to membership of the Chinese Communist Party using unique twins data that the authors collected from urban China. Our ordinary least squares estimate shows that being a Party member increases earnings by 28.1 percent, but when we use a...

This paper measures the effect of China's one-child policy on fertility by exploring the natural experiment that has been created by China's unique affirmative birth control policy, which is possibly the largest social experiment in human history. Because the one-child policy only applied to Han...

In interpreting the positive relationship between spousal education and one's earnings, economists have two major hypotheses: cross-productivity between couples and assortative mating. However, no prior empirical study has been able to separate the two effects. This paper empirically...

In this paper, we examine the effect of maternal education on the health of young children by using a large sample of adopted children from China. As adopted children are genetically unrelated to the nurturing parents, the educational effect on them is most likely to be the nurturing effect. We...

This paper empirically estimates the returns to education using twins data that the authors collected from urban China. Our ordinary least-squares estimate shows that one year of schooling increases an individual¡¦s earnings by 8.4 percent. However, once we use the within-twin-pair fixed...