China's rapid growth was fueled by substantial physical capital investments applied to a large stock of medium skilled labor acquired before economic reforms began. As development proceeded, the demand for high skilled labor has grown, and, in the past decade, China has made substantial...

As China's firms upgrade their position in the quality ladder, vocational education may become more important. In this paper, we study returns to secondary vocational education in China paying attention to individual heterogeneity. We use instrumental variables based on geographical and...

China's rapid growth was fueled by substantial physical capital investments applied to a large stock of medium skilled labor acquired before economic reforms began. As development proceeded, the demand for high skilled labor has grown, and, in the past decade, China has made substantial...

This paper estimates the gender-specific effects of birthweight on a variety of schooling and labor market outcomes. A unique feature of the study is to use micro evidence on the relationship between birthweight - an early measure of nutritional advantage - and schooling outcomes to make...

We propose a novel framework to analyse the macroeconomic impact of noncommunicable diseases. We incorporate measures of disease prevalence into a human capital augmented production function, which enables us to determine the economic costs of chronic health conditions in terms of foregone gross...

In this paper we study whether the presence of binding liquidity constraints and the existence of fixed costs can explain the underinvestment of parents in their children's human capital. We first incorporate these two potential mechanisms into the theoretical model of Raut & Tran (2005) and...

China, like other middle income countries, is facing the challenges of the next stage of development as its leaders seek to guide the nation into becoming a high income country. In this article we explore one of the major challenges that China is facing in the transition from middle to high...

Understanding the factors that may produce a sustained rate of innovation is important for promoting economic development and growth. In this paper, we examine the role of human capital in firms' innovation by using a large sample of manufacturing firms from China. We use two firm-level datasets...

The results of China’s recent census, which showed a continued slowing in population growth triggered much discussion of the implications for China’s economic growth potential and knock-on implications for debt sustainability. Demographic projections show a rapidly aging population, implying...