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...

This paper analyzes changes in the gender earnings gap in urban China over the period 1988–2004 using urban household survey data. The mean female/male earnings ratio declined from 86.3% to 76.2%. Mainly responsible for this diverging trend were rapid increases in returns to both observed and...

China's economic reform has affected various ownership sectors to different degree. A comparison of gender wage differentials and discrimination among individuals employed in the three sectors - state sector, the collective sector, and the private sector - provides information on the impact of...

The impacts of pure sex preference and differential earnings opportunities by gender on investments in children are modelled with altruism. If bequest constraints do not bind human investments are privately efficient, with the higher-earning gender receiving more education. Education does not...

This paper develops an overlapping-generations model in which agents invest in health to prolong life in both working and retirement periods. It explores how unfunded social security with or without health subsidies affects life expectancy, economic growth, and welfare. In particular, by...

This paper empirically estimates the returns to membership of the Chinese Communist Party using unique twins data that the authors collected from urban China. Our ordinary least squares estimate shows that being a Party member increases earnings by 28.1 percent, but when we use a...

This paper analyzes changes in the gender earnings gap in urban China over the period 1988–2004 using urban household survey data. The mean female/male earnings ratio declined from 86.3% to 76.2%. Mainly responsible for this diverging trend were rapid increases in returns to both observed...

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...