The belief that elections reduce rent seeking by government officials is widely held, likewise the belief that rent seeking decreases as elections are less subject to corruption. In this paper we develop and test a model in which these beliefs are carefully examined. Our model indicates that,...

Deborah Davis-Friedmann (1991) described the "retirement" pattern of the Chinese elderly in the prereform era as "ceaseless toil": lacking sufficient means of support, the elderly had to work their entire lives. In this paper we re-cast the metaphor of ceaseless toil in a labor supply model,...

We investigate the consequences of imperfect factor market development for farm efficiency in North China. We estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (as opposed to market) allocation of land, combined with unevenly...

The paper estimates how parents adjust bride-prices and land divisions to compensate their sons for differences in their schooling investments in rural China. The main estimate implies that when a son receives one yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he will obtain 0.7 yuan more...