This paper uses the 2011 China Household Finance Survey data to estimate the effect of change in housing value on homeowners' labor force participation. Using the average housing capital gains of other homes in the same community as an instrument for the housing capital gains of a given...

This paper develops a new approach for measuring the stringency of a major form of land-use regulation, building-height restrictions, and it applies the method to an extraordinary dataset of land-lease transactions from China. Our theory shows that the elasticity of land price with respect to...

We hypothesize that individuals with a larger social-family network are more likely to choose self-employment. We test this hypothesis using data on temporary rural-urban migrants in China. The size of a migrant's social-family network is measured by the number of relatives and friends this...

Throughout the imperial era, defensive walls surrounded Chinese cities. Although most city walls have vanished, the cities have survived. We analyze a sample of nearly 300 prefectural-level cities in China, among which about half historically had city walls. We document that cities that had...