Research

Research Interests


Working Papers

Abstract: Do peers in childhood influence the development of noncognitive skills? Despite a large literature on peer effects, peer effects on children's noncognitive skills remain unknown. To answer this question, we use Big Five Inventory measures of personality traits linked to the administrative records of children randomly assigned to primary school classrooms. We find that children exposed to the ``left-behind'' classmates whose parents temporarily migrated away for work become less conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable in childhood. We further show suggestive evidence that the convergence in personality traits among friends explain the negative peer effects. 


Abstract: Climate change poses significant threats to the children's development, but its impacts are not well known because of data and methodological limitations. Using a unique panel study in disadvantaged rural communities, we find that exposures to low temperatures undermine subsequent cognitive development before age 5, and reduce caregiver-child interactions and material investments. Climate affects children likely by disrupting human capital investments in children instead of household income, child's health, or temporary cognitive performance. Our results suggest that climate change may widen socioeconomic inequalities across households by affecting their capacity to adapt, which is severely limited among disadvantaged households.


Publications

Abstract: In this paper, we model the associations of childhood health on adult health and socio-economic status outcomes in China using a new sample of middle aged and older Chinese respondents. Modeled after the American Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), the CHARLS Pilot survey respondents are 45 years and older in two quite distinct provinces—Zhejiang, a high growth industrialized province on the East Coast and Gansu, a largely agricultural and poor province in the West. Childhood health in CHARLS relies on two measures that proxy for different dimensions of health during the childhood years. The first is a retrospective self-evaluation using a standard five-point scale (excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor) of general state of one's health when one was less than 16 years old. The second is adult height believed to be a good measure of levels of nutrition during early childhood and the prenatal period. We relate both these childhood health measures to adult health and SES outcomes during the adult years. We find strong associations of childhood health on adult health outcomes particularly among Chinese women and strong associations with adult BMI particularly for Chinese men.

Abstract: We are concerned in this paper with measuring health outcomes among the elderly in Zhejiang and Gansu provinces, China, and examining the relationships between different dimensions of health status and measures of socio-economic status (SES). We are CHARLS pilot data to document health conditions, using a very rich set of health indicators that include both self-reported measures and biomarkers. We also examine correlations between these health outcomes and two important indicators of socio-economic status (SES): education and log of per capita expenditure (log pce), our preferred measure of household resources. In general education tends to be positively correlated with better health outcomes, as it is in other countries. However, unmeasured community influences turn out to be highly important, much more so than one usually finds in other countries. While it is not yet clear which aspects of communities matter and why they matter, we set up an agenda for future research on this topic. We also find a large degree of under-diagnosis of hypertension, a major health problems that afflicts the aged. This implies that the current health system is not well prepared to address the rapid aging of the Chinese population, at least not in Gansu and Zhejiang.


Work in Progress