The Chinese government implemented the universal two-child policy on January 1, 2016 to arrest the decline in the nation's birthrate and address the challenge of a rapidly aging population. We find that this policy significantly increased the possibility of having children and this effect was...

The rural elderly in the People's Republic of China spend less on medical expenditures as they age despite declining health, which raises welfare concerns. This paper investigates the role of intra-household bargaining power on health expenditures of the elderly by evaluating the impact of cash...

Evidence from a range of different sources suggests that Chinese workers lost 20-36 million jobs because of the global financial crisis. Most of these layoffs affected migrant workers, who have typically lacked employment protection, tend to be concentrated in export-oriented sectors, and were...

Using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study 2008 pilot, this paper analyzes the patterns and correlates of intergenerational transfers between elderly parents and adult children in Zhejiang and Gansu Provinces. The pilot is a unique data source from China that provides information...

This paper first reviews the history of social insurance policy and coverage in urban China, documenting the evolution in the coverage of pensions and medical and unemployment insurance for both local residents and migrants, and highlighting obstacles to expanding coverage. The paper then uses...

This paper presents empirical evidence from household and firm survey data collected during 2009-2010 on the implementation of the 2008 Labor Contract Law and its effects on China's workers. The government and local labor bureaus have made substantial efforts to enforce the provisions of the new...

East Asia is undergoing a rapid demographic transition and "super" aging. As a result of steadily decreasing fertility and increasing life expectancy, older people's proportion of the population and the old-age dependency ratio is rising across all countries in East Asia, particularly in the...

We provide causal evidence from a developing country context that children exposed to lead at a young age exhibit worse cognitive outcomes. We exploit variation in exposure to leadcontaminated toxic sites in Indonesia and estimate a two-way fixed effects model using variation in age at first...

In the originally published version of this manuscript, captions in Figures 3 and 6 were mistakenly removed during the production process. The Publisher apologizes for this error, which has now been corrected.https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhac005

We study children's access to remote learning when schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic and their parents' perceptions about learning progress in seven Southeast Asian countries. This is the first regional analysis to systematically document students' access to remote learning based...