I present a study of ownership of firms under government rent seeking. Using its control of regulated inputs, a government agency extracts rents from a manager who undertakes an investment. Such a government rent seeking activity leads to a typical hold-up problem. Government ownership is shown...

This paper examines the role of social learning in household enrollment decisions for the New Cooperative Medical Scheme in rural China by estimating a static game with incomplete information. Using a rich dataset from the China Health and Nutrition Survey, we find that the social network...

During the Cultural Revolution China embarked on a remarkable, albeit temporary, expansion of post-primary education in rural areas. This education expansion affected tens of millions of children who reached secondary school age in the late 1960s and 1970s. Exploiting the education expansion and...

Based on China Household Income Project rural data, this paper aims to study the changes of rural household income mobility in transitional China. The results show that with the economic reform and development, income mobility between 2007 and 2009 was much stronger than before. Regarding the...

The New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS) program was implemented in response to illness-led poverty and poor state of healthcare in rural China. Supported by government subsidy, more and more poor rural households are now enrolled in the NCMS. This paper investigates the impact of the NCMS...

Economists have long recognized the important role of formal schooling and cognitive skills on labor market participation and wages. More recently, increasing attention has turned to the role of personality traits, or noncognitive skills. This study is among the first to examine how both...

Using the data from the three waves (1995, 2002, and 2008) of the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP), this paper investigates the impact of land tenure security on farmers' labor market outcomes in rural China. To identify the effect of land tenure security, this paper used...

This paper evaluates the effect of a free compulsory education reform in rural China on the incidence of child labor. We exploit the cross-province variation in the roll-out of the reform and apply a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the causal effects of the reform. We find that...

The paper tests for external effects of local economic activity on consumption and income growth at the farm household level using panel data from four provinces of post-reform rural China. The tests allow for nonstationary fixed effects in the consumption growth process. Evidence is found of...