Enabling educated individuals to work abroad entails a brain drain and results in educated unemployment at home. Because the prospect of migration raises the expected returns to higher education it also facilitates a "brain gain": a eveloping economy ends up with a higher fraction of educated...

In this paper, we use new survey data on twins born in urban China, among whom many experienced the consequences of the forced mass rustication movement of the Chinese "cultural revolution," to identify the distinct roles of altruism and guilt in affecting behavior within families. Based on a...

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...

Parental schooling is widely thought to improve child outcomes. But most studies on parental-child relations are associative, without control for estimation problems, such as unobserved intergenerationally-correlated endowments, if causality is of interest. The few exceptions are relatively...

An open question in the literature is whether families compensate or reinforce the impact of child health shocks. Discussions usually focus on one dimension of child investment. This paper examines multiple dimensions using household survey data on Chinese child twins whose average age is 11. We...

An open question in the literature is whether families compensate or reinforce the impact of child health shocks. Discussions usually focus on one dimension of child investment. This paper examines multiple dimensions using household survey data on Chinese child twins whose average age is 11. We...

This chapter reviews the growing literature on the child quantity quality (QQ) trade-off. During the transition from the traditional agricultural economy to modern economic growth, household real income increases, fertility decreases, and human capital investment per child increases. Motivated...

In this paper, we define “The Chinese Saving Puzzle” as the persistently high national saving rate at 34-53 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the past three decades and a surge in the saving rate by 11 percentage points from 2000 to 2008. Using data from the Flow of Funds Accounts...

In China, the male-biased sex ratio has increased significantly. Because the one-child policy only applied to the Han Chinese but not to minorities, this unique affirmative policy allows us to identify the causal effect of the one-child policy on the increase in sex ratios by a...