ABSTRACT The support for the elderly is facing big challenges with the problem of population aging. Transfers from adult children could partly insure elderly parents against low income and high medical expenditure. There are two main motives for transfers in the literature, namely altruism and...

Housing price has increased dramatically in China during the past decade. The appreciation of house value could relax credit constraint and thus encourage entrepreneurship. However, a house serves as both an important investment channel and a prerequisite for marriage in China. The continuous...

Using recently developed industry-specific purchasing power parities (PPPs), we test for β-convergence and σ-convergence of labor productivity at one-digit and two-digit industrial levels for 17 OECD countries. We confirm that the principal finding of Bernard and Jones (1996)—that...

Voting referenda provide direct evidence of the demand for public goods. A number of previous studies have used referenda to analyze the support for public environmental goods. These studies have used aggregate data from large jurisdictional units (usually counties) and summary income measures...

This paper estimates the labor supply functions for health care professionals in China using Census-based data in 2005. The rapid economic growth and population aging in China led to a substantial increase in the demand for health care services and the derived demand for health care...

"It has been argued in the literature that China is underurbanized in large part because of restrictions on migration. While the presence of migration barriers can help explain why existing cities fail to achieve their optimal size, it cannot explain the lack of cities. Although migration has...

This paper examines a distinctive mechanism of providing incentives to local governments – upgrading counties to "cities". In China, awarding city status to existing counties is the dominant way of creating new urban administrative units, during which the local government gets many benefits....

This paper investigates two competing theories of soft budget constraint (SBC), namely the ownership hypothesis and the policy burden hypothesis. While the ownership hypothesis attributes the SBC problem to government ownership, the policy burden hypothesis predicts that privatization would not...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to estimate the value of a statistical life (VSL) in China using the hedonic wage model, and to explore the regional difference in VSL within the country. Design/methodology/approach – Using the hedonic wage regression, this paper estimates the...