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.

Public health policies generate significant health benefits, but their social outcomes remain underexplored. I use China’s COVID-19 lockdown as a quasi-experimental setting to explore its impact on household instability. In a staggered Difference-in-Difference framework, I find that each additional week of lockdown was associated with a 4% increase in divorce-related internet searches across prefectures, indicating heightened household instability on the intensive margin. The surge in searches for domestic violence during the same period suggests that it played an important role in amplifying divorce concerns. Moreover, I develop more precise measures of lockdown stringency and find that more stringent shutdowns are associated with greater marital concerns. Further analyses suggest that higher levels of savings and unemployment insurance coverage help alleviate marital strains during lockdowns. Consistently, individual-level data show that lockdowns cause a lasting drop in marital satisfaction, particularly among younger women. In contrast, the impacts on parent–child relationships are milder. My findings, based on the largest-scale lockdown, underscore the importance of addressing intra-household tensions in extensive public health interventions.

This paper examines how institutional restrictions on fertility create a large demand for illegal adoption and hence, incur more child abduction in China’s context. Using hand-collected data on abducted children during 1979-2000, both theoretical and empirical findings suggest that a more severe penalty for unauthorized birth locally leads to more children being trafficked to the region. However, the effect is significant only on male victims and is more pronounced in regions with more Confucian heritage. These findings underscore the significance of concerns stemming from strong preferences for family size and male offspring, which should not be underestimated in the implementation of fertility restriction. My study also calls for greater attention to the demand side when combating child abduction in developing countries.