This paper estimates how online consumer spending responds to changes in air pollution. We address the endogeneity of air pollution in affecting household consumption by exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in air quality caused by China's Huai River heating policy. We use a comprehensive...

Since 1998, housing policies in urban China have gone through a series of reforms that transformed housing allocation from a centralized welfare housing system to a market-oriented housing system. Through the process welfare dwelling residents are eligible to purchase their existing dwelling at...

In this paper, we examine the issue of consumption insurance in the context of urban China, where the wage structure and social security system changed dramatically during the 1990s. Using a national representative household survey from 1992 to 2003, we construct a pseudo panel dataset to study...

This study draws on a survey of migrants in 12 cities across four major urbanizing areas in China and investigates the structure of migrant worker families' urban and rural consumption. The results show that the structure of migrant worker families' consumption has been dominated by survival...

This paper introduces the current social insurance system in China and discusses how the system affects household consumption and saving behavior. We focus on two important components of this system: health insurance and social security. For the health insurance system, we exploit a...

The luxury goods market in China has seen a significant increase in consumer spending over the last decade. Researchers have identified economic transition and a growing middle-class to explain this evolving trend. A less discussed but important contextual determinant is growing income...

Increasingly, rural households in developing countries are shopping for food online, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this trend. In parallel, dietary guidelines worldwide recommend eating a balanced and healthy diet. With this in mind, this study explores whether online food shopping...

In this paper, I analyze detailed data on intergenerational transfers in 4 countries (China, India, Japan, and the United States) from the "Japan Household Panel Survey on Consumer Preferences and Satisfaction (JHPS-CPS)" which has been conducted by the Institute of Social and Economic Research...

I develop a model of conspicuous consumption to empirically measure the importance of peer beliefs to Americans and Chinese. In the model, a consumer cares not only about the direct utility she receives from consumption, but also about the way her consumption pattern affects her peer group's...

China's rise has been the economic success story of the past four decades but economic growth has been slowing and domestic imbalances have widened. This paper analyses the recent evolution of China's imbalances, the risks they pose to the economic outlook and the potential impact of a...