Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, independent entrepreneurial migrants from China have been increasingly flocking to Africa in search of greener pastures. This paper scrutinizes the empirical foundations of the increasingly hostile discourses of African traders regarding the...

China has turned from a 'low risk' to a 'high risk' society since the start of the market reforms in the late 1970s. Market, while bringing diverse livelihood opportunities to rural people, has simultaneously distributed risks, and the exposure and vulnerability to them unequally among different...

China's energy-service companies (ESCOs) have developed only modestly despite favorable political and market conditions. We argue that with sophisticated market institutions still evolving in China, trust-based relations between ESCOs and energy customers are essential for successful...

This paper studies relationships between social networks, health and subjective well-being (SWB) using nationally representative data of the Chinese Population - the Chinese Family Panel Studies (CFPS). Our data contain SWB indicators in two widely used variants - happiness and...

This paper studies the role of strong versus weak ties in the rural-to-urban migration decision in China. We first develop a network model that puts forward the different roles of weak and strong ties in helping workers to migrate to the city. We then use a unique longitudinal data that allows...

Over the past two decades, more than 160 million rural residents have migrated to cities in China. They are usually separated from their rural families and work in an unfamiliar, and sometimes hostile, city environment. This paper investigates to what extent city social networks alleviate mental...

Over the past two decades, more than 160 million Chinese rural workers have migrated to cities to work. They are separated from their familiar rural networks to work in an unfamiliar, and often hostile environment. Many of them thus face significant mental health challenges. This paper is the...

Despite the resultant disutility, some people, in particular, the poor, are engaged in behaviors that carry social stigma. Empirical studies on stigmatized behavior are rare, largely due to the formidable challenges of collecting data on stigmatized goods and services. In this paper, we add to...

The tradition of keeping written records of gift received during household ceremonies in many countries offers researchers an underutilized means of data collection for social network analysis. This paper first summarizes unique features of the gift record data that circumvent five prevailing...

Using data on team assignment and weekly output for all weavers in an urban Chinese textile firm between April 2003 and March 2004, this paper studies a) how randomly assigned teammates affect an individual worker's behavior under a tournament-style incentive scheme, and b) how such effects...