Better contraception will have competing impacts on marital stability and divorce rates. Preexisting marriages are likely to become less stable as better contraception raises the value of reentering the dating market. Subsequent marriages are likely to be more stable as couples delay marriages...

This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic in Taiwan as a natural experiment to test whether in utero conditions affect long run developmental outcomes. Combining several historical and contemporaneous datasets, we find that cohorts in utero during the pandemic are less educated, shorter as...

This paper performs a meta-analysis to investigate how changes over time, model specifications, differences in data sets, and variable definitions could contribute to the differences in estimates of returns to education in China. The results show that approximately 10 percent of the variation...

We compare the characteristics and regression coefficients between the participants in a field experiment in China and the survey population from which they were recruited. The experimental participants were more educated, younger, more likely to be male, more risk-loving and work fewer hours...

I estimate how new information about children's cognitive abilities leads parents to adjust investment within and across children. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth matched mother-child data to construct measures of both child cognitive ability and parental investment during...

I study the effects of improvements in contraception on premarital sexual behavior, pregnancy, and marriage. I develop a model where individuals date before marrying in order to learn about relationship quality. While dating, individuals face the risk of pregnancy or contracting a...

Past studies find that apologies affect the outcomes of medical malpractice litigation, but such studies have largely been limited to laboratory surveys or case studies. Following Ho and Liu (2010), we use the passage of state-level apology laws that exclude apologies from being used as evidence...

Despite insect-resistant Bt cotton has been lauded for its ability to reduce the use of pesticides, studies have shown that Chinese Bt cotton farmers continue to use excessive amounts of pesticides. Using results from a survey and an artefactual field experiment, we find that farmers who are...

This paper examines whether the saving decisions among a large, unique sample of working-class American families around the turn of the twentieth century are consistent with consumption smoothing tendencies in the spirit of the permanent income hypothesis. We develop an econometric model to...