Using 2006 China Agricultural Census (CAC), we examine whether the introduction of the New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) has affected child mortality, maternal mortality, and school enrollment of the 6-16 years olds. Our data cover 5.9 million people living in eight low-income rural...

This paper studies human-capital spillovers and its persistence by exploiting a unique event in modern Chinahe send-down movement. From 1962 to 1979, the Chinese central government mandated the temporary resettlement of roughly 18 million urban youths to rural areas across the country. The...

This paper estimates the effects of the send-down movement during the Cultural Revolution---when about 16 million urban youth were mandated to resettle in the countryside---on rural education. Using a county-level dataset compiled from local gazetteers and population censuses, we show that...

Raw data suggest that enrolling in NCMS is associated with better school enrollment and lower mortality of young children and pregnant women. However, using a difference-in-difference propensity score method, we find most of these differences are driven by the endogenous introduction and take-up...

Gong et al. (2021) made additional challenges to our original paper (Chen et al., 2020A) after we made a detailed reply in Chen et al. (2021) to Gong et al. (2020). In this further reply, we use data-based evidence to demonstrate how Gong et al. (2021) misread or/and misinterpreted our paper and...