Rotating Savings and Credit Association (Rosca) is an important informal financial institution in many parts of the world used by participants to share income risks. What is the role of Rosca when formal credit market is introduced? We develop a model in which risk-averse participants attempt...

International travel is a key channel of international knowledge diffusion and has been hypothesized to shape large cross-country differences in productivity and income. However, evidence supporting this hypothesis, especially from developing countries, remains scarce. This paper examines the...

This paper empirically examines the role of radical grain yield targets in triggering China's Great Famine (1959-1961), one of the largest man-made catastrophes in human history. Starting from 1958, the Chinese central government assigned different grain yield targets to most counties based on...

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...