The fetal origins hypothesis (hereafter FOH), put forward in the epidemiological literature and later flourished in the economics literature, suggests that the time in utero is a critical period for human development. However, much attention has been paid to the consequences of fetal exposures...

China launched a pension program for rural residents in 2009, now covering more than 300 million Chinese. This program offers a unique setting for studying the ageing population, given the rapidity of China's population ageing, traditions of filial piety and co-residence, decreasing number of...

Status concern and the feelings of relative deprivation affect individual behavior and well-being. Traditional norms and the alarming inequality in China have made relative deprivation more and more intense for the Chinese population. This paper reviews empirical literature on China that...

It has been widely recognized that the poor spends a significant proportion of their income on social spending even at the expense of basic consumption. What are the motives behind the observed lavish social spending among the poor? We attempt to test three competing explanations at the social...

Cognitive functioning is critical as in our daily life a host of real-world complex decisions in high-stakes markets have to be made. The decision-making process can be vulnerable to environmental stressors. Summarizing the growing economic and epidemiologic evidence linking air pollution,...

The received wisdom is that cheaper foreign inputs may replace tasks previously done by domestic labor, and cause displacement of workers at the home country. However, using the U.S. multinational enterprises data, the empirical evidence in this paper does not support the idea that the imported...