Data on 2,355 married women from the 2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey are used to study how female employment affects fertility in China. China has deep concerns with both population size and female employment, so the relationship between the two should be better understood. Causality...

The construction industry is important for Chinese rural to urban migrants. Over 90% of urban construction workers are rural migrants, and over a third of all rural migrants work in construction. The construction industry is not only particularly important, but is also different from other...

In 1997, the Mexican government designed the conditional cash transfer program Progresa, which became the worldwide model of a new approach to social programs, simultaneously targeting human capital accumulation and poverty reduction. A large literature has documented the short and medium-term...

The notion of policy experimentation was proposed to explain China’s adaptability in policy-making process. Heilmann (2008a) proposed ‘decentralised experimentation with ad hoc interference’ as the central feature of policy experimentation. Through installing ‘experimental points’ at...

Using multiple births as an Instrumental Variable (IV) for family size and data for 43 developing countries, I find evidence that a shock in fertility has a cost for a family as a whole. Mothers are more likely to live under less stable family arrangements and they are more likely to use...

Protecting the entitlements of some inherently requires preventing others from claiming and controlling those same resources. Yet much recent research regarding property rights and economic development treats the level of property rights security in a country as homogeneous. This one-dimensional...

Using a new set of indicators that measure the Property Insecurity of ethnopolitical minority groups, I find that Property Insecurity is not correlated with the Risk of Expropriation facing foreign investors and domestic elites – revealing that the aggregate measures of 'institutional quality'...

This paper investigates how unauthorized immigrants' illegal status affects their children's scholastic achievement in the U.S. The answer to this question calls attention to the intergenerational consequence of the U.S. immigration legislation. In order to estimate the intergenerational effect...

We test whether the availability of the emergency contraceptive (“morning after”) pill in the absence of legalised abortion can have effects similar to those of other large-scale contraceptive reforms. To do so we examine a quasi-experimental policy reform occurring in Chile in 2008. Using...

English abstract: Asylum seekers with a rejected application account for three out of five illegal migrants in Germany. The objective of this paper is to calculate asylum seekers’ ex ante returns on overstaying. It takes advantage of a unique survey designed to permit estimation of a...