Do Chinese international construction and engineering contractors (ICEC) in Africa have any agency themselves, or are their strings tightly controlled by the Chinese state? Join Hong Zhang as she unpacks the role of ICECs in China's international economic relations – her findings based on...

Do Chinese international construction and engineering contractors (ICEC) in Africa have any agency themselves, or are their strings tightly controlled by the Chinese state? Join Hong Zhang as she unpacks the role of ICECs in China's international economic relations – her findings based on...

This paper introduces and critically analyzes an emerging form of global infrastructure development by China's infrastructure construction companies, known as "integrated investment, construction, and operation" (IICO). This model has been promoted by the Chinese infrastructure industry,...

Chinese companies have been seeking to climb up the value chain by becoming investors and operators of the infrastructure projects they are contracted to build. Despite their prominent market share in Africa as contractors, Chinese companies face a steep learning curve and have sought to work...

We hypothesize that poor country-level governance, which makes public information less reliable, induces fund managers to increase their use of semi-public information. Utilizing data from international mutual funds and stocks over the 2000-2009 period, we find that semi-public...

Using a national representative sample in China from three largest on-going surveys, this study examines the effects of education on health among working-age population and explores the potential mechanisms. Using the exogenous variation in temporal and geographical impacts of Compulsory...

The rise in education of women relative to men is an emerging worldwide phenomenon in recent decades. This paper investigates the impact of the birth control policies on teenage girls' education attainment. The estimates suggest that the policies explain 30 percent of the education increase for...

People may have imperfect information about their health status and thus make suboptimal decisions in insurance participation. Using national representative samples of the elderly in US and China, we find that people with lower socio-economic status and poorer health are relatively less likely...

Using plausibly exogenous variations in the ethnicity-specific assigned birth quotas and different fertility penalties across Chinese provinces over time, we provide new evidence for the transferable utility model by showing how China's One-Child Policy induced a significantly higher unmarried...

This paper examines the impacts of social pension provision among people of different ages. Utilizing the county-by-county rollout of the New Rural Pension Scheme in rural China, we find that, among the age-eligible people, the scheme provision leads to higher household income (18 percent) and...