The impact of socio-economic status on health has been widely recognized, but the independent impact of social status alone on health remains inconclusive. We approach this challenge by exploiting a natural experiment in which subjects undergo a shift in their social status without considerable...

We study the implications of financial-market imperfections on labor and capital misallocation in China. Financial friction stems from private sectors' credit constraints that limit the efficient use of capital relative to state firms. Our model can jointly explain labor flows out of and capital...

We study the implications of financial-market imperfections on labor and capital misallocation in China. Financial friction stems from private sectors' credit constraints that limit the efficient use of capital relative to state firms. Our model can jointly explain labor flows out of and capital...

We estimate selection and sorting effects on the evolution of the private return to schooling for college graduates during China's between 1988 and 2002. We pay special attention to the changing role of sorting by ability versus budget-constraint effects as China's education policy has changed...

We investigate the role of factor-priced-induced innovation in mediating the employment impact of expanding production in China. Our empirical approach implements concepts developed in Acemoglu (2010) and complements the approaches summarized by Wei, Xie, and Zhang (2017) that focus on directly...

Using data from CHIPS 1995-2013, we find polarization of employment from middle-income Skilled jobs to work in the Unskilled and Self-Employment job categories. This redistribution of employment is consistent with the automation of routine noncognitive tasks in the skilled sector as analyzed in...

We examine the mechanism by which human capital affects economic growth and convergence, using provincial level panel data from China. We specify alternative measures of human capital and apply them to an enhanced growth model which we estimate parametrically, nonparametrically, and with a...

We find that second-generation effects of in utero and early childhood malnutrition on the school participation of the offspring of mothers who experienced the China Great Leap Forward Famine. The direct impact on entrance to senior high school is also negative, but smaller in magnitude than...

Intangible knowledge capital (IKC) – technology produced by workers but not embodied in them – can offset the "middle income trap" as China exhausts the benefits of international technology transfer. IKC is productivity-enhancing among Chinese enterprises – more so in domestically owned...