We study marital sorting on academic qualifications and latent ability in an equilibrium marriage market model using the 1972 UK Raising of the School-Leaving Age (RoSLA) legislation as a natural experiment that induced a sudden, large shift in the distribution of academic qualifications in...

This paper bridges the financial market and the marriage market using a reference-dependent mechanism. Male-biased sex ratios induce families with sons to hold more risky assets, since competitive marital payment in a tight market raises the reference level of marriage expenditure for such...

This paper first finds a clear pattern of child gender difference in family migration in China. Specifically, our estimates show that on average, the first child being a son increases the father's migration probability by 25.2 percent. We hypothesize that the family's competitive earning...

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...

We first document three stylized facts about marriage and fertility in East Asian societies: They have the highest marriage rates in the world, but the lowest total fertility; they have the lowest total fertility, but almost all married women have at least one child. By contrast, almost no...

We examine the launch of a mobile outpatient appointment app in China to study the effect of information provision and a streamlined appointment process on hospital operations and the alignment of healthcare supply and demand. Using a longitudinal dataset on hospital operations and a...

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 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...

China's rapid growth was fueled by substantial physical capital investments applied to a large stock of medium skilled labor acquired before economic reforms began. As development proceeded, the demand for high skilled labor has grown, and, in the past decade, China has made substantial...

We study the rise in marriages between residents of HK and China following the handover of HK to China in 1997. Cross-boundary marriages accounted for almost half the marriages registered in HK in 2006. Because of large differences in male income between China and HK, marriages of HK men with...