This paper examines the impacts of China’s family planning policies in the 1970s (“Later, Longer, Fewer” campaign) on the long-term career advancement of men and women. Despite the high female labor participation rates, I use a cohort Triple-Difference approach and find a significant gender gap in achieving managerial positions among those affected by the policies, with average exposure reducing these disparities by 20%. The narrowing of the gender gap is more pronounced for women in non-white-collar or non-female-dominated industries, where fewer institutional advantages leave women more vulnerable to fertility-related career disruptions. Women more exposed to family planning policies tend to seek college education, increase labor input, and rely less on offspring for old-age support, with no analogous findings in males, suggesting that human capital accumulation is a key mechanism for the narrowing of the gender gap in career outcomes. This paper underscores the capacity of policy interventions to influence labor market dynamics and foster gender equality.

We examine whether the highly orchestrated setting of evening art auctions increases prices relative to day sales. Using three datasets—including repeat-sales data for Impressionist and Contemporary art, and a restricted sample of homogeneous works by Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst—we estimate the “evening effect” via propensity score matching. Across specifications, evening sales command premia of 40–60% in prices and pre-sale estimates. Controlling for estimates and other observables, we find a residual evening premium of 5–15%. We interpret these results as consistent with a contextual or design-driven “halo effect.” We also show that evening placement in the first sale of a pair is negatively related to subsequent returns. Finally, we conclude that placing high-valued paintings in evening sales that take place before the day sales is optimal for revenue. These findings highlight the role of market design in shaping auction outcomes.

We study whether association with a defeated side in civil conflict can persist across cohorts and shape bureaucratic careers. The Jingnan Campaign (1399--1402) offers a useful contrast between political rupture and institutional continuity: the civil war over imperial succession in Ming China brought a new emperor to power while leaving the examination-based bureaucracy intact. We identify counties associated with the defeated side from records of officials who died for the deposed emperor and link these counties to examination and career records for later jinshi, holders of the highest civil-service examination degree, which provided a principal route into elite official service. Comparing cohorts from these and other counties before and after 1402, we find no broad decline in successful examination entry. Instead, larger differences emerge after examination success: later jinshi from these counties are less likely to receive initial capital appointments and attain lower subsequent ranks. Rank losses are larger where the most senior recorded loyalist had held higher office and remain concentrated at the county level. These patterns suggest that political conflict can leave durable, place-based differences in bureaucratic opportunity despite continuity in formal recruitment.

Public health restrictions generate substantial health benefits but may also impose social costs within households. I study China’s COVID-19 lockdown as a quasi-experimental shock to home confinement and examine its effects on household stability. Using a Difference-in-Differences design, I find that an average five-week lockdown increases divorce-related searches by about 18.5 percent, consistent with heightened latent marital strain when formal adjustment is constrained. Economic security buffers these responses: higher pre-pandemic savings and unemployment insurance coverage mitigate increases in marital distress. These patterns are mirrored in survey data, where marital satisfaction declines by 0.35 standard deviations, especially among mothers with greater childcare burdens, while parent–child relationship measures change more modestly. The findings highlight an unintended household cost of large-scale mobility restrictions that is not directly captured by official records.

This paper examines whether fertility restrictions can increase destination-side demand for trafficked children by making out-of-plan births more costly. In the context of China’s one-child policy, households facing binding quantity constraints and severe penalties for unauthorized births may shift toward illegal adoption, which avoids pregnancy-related detection and can be easier to conceal administratively. Using a hand-collected dataset of self-reported child abduction victims from 1979 to 2000, I find that stricter local penalties for unauthorized births are associated with more children being trafficked into a prefecture. A one-standard-deviation increase in the penalty fine is associated with about 13 percent more abducted children being trafficked into a prefecture, with the effect concentrated among boys. The estimated relationship is also stronger in prefectures with deeper Confucian heritage, consistent with stronger preferences for larger family size and male offspring. These findings suggest that population-control policies can spill over into illicit child markets by raising the value of an additional child, implying that fertility-policy enforcement and child-protection policy should be considered jointly.