Many children worldwide are left-behind by parents migrating for work — over 61 million in rural China alone, almost half of whom are left-behind by both parents. While previous literature considers impacts of one parent absent on educational inputs (e.g., study time, enrollment, schooling...

This book presents an accessible and sometimes controversial economic exploration of numerous issues surrounding sex, marriage and family. It analyzes the role of ‘vanity’, defined as social status and self-esteem, in social and economic behaviors.

Corrupt officials can use their positions to enrich themselves in two ways. They can steal from the state budget--embezzling or misspending funds--or they can demand extra payments from citizens in return for services--bribery. In many circumstances, embezzlement is less distortionary than...

This paper applies the recently developed econometric methods of panel unit root tests and nonlinear mean reversion to investigate price convergence in China-the largest transitional economy in the world. We find that prices did converge to the law of one price in China for an overwhelming...

This paper synthesizes and extends recent research on “The New Economics of the Brain Drainâ€. In a unified framework, the paper shows that while recently identified adverse repercussions of the brain drain exacerbate the long-recognized negative impact of the brain drain, longer-term...

This paper analyses child labor and children's human capital formation in response to the changes of the relative wage-productivity between child labor and adult labor. It implies that because children's labor market participation raises the financial resources spent on their education, a small...

This paper analyzes the interaction between firms' investment in general skills training and workers' incentives. It shows that when a firm has an informational advantage over its workers, its provision of free general skills training can serve as a signal that there will be a long-term...