Research
Research
The Gender Wealth Gap in China (May 2024) SOFI Working Papers in Labour Economics 3/2024
Abstract: I describe the gender wealth gap in China and explore the reasons behind its expansion in recent decades. The analysis suggests that a combination of China’s 2011 Marriage Law reform and soaring housing prices contribute to this widening gap. The reform shifts the division of housing property upon divorce from an equal (50-50) distribution to one contingent upon the names registered on the housing deed, thereby conferring a wealth advantage to husbands usually registered on the housing deed. Descriptive analysis reveals that men hold more ownership of housing and wealth than women. Specifically, I demonstrate that, post-reform, husbands possess 22% more housing property share than their wives, resulting in an increased housing wealth advantage of 44,884 CNY (equivalent to 7.9 times the annual income of wives in 2010). A dynamic difference-in-differences (DID) analysis indicates that although husbands’ share of property ownership initially surged and then declined post-reform, their proportion of housing wealth continued to increase and stabilize, primarily due to the rapid rise of housing prices. Furthermore, heterogeneity analysis shows a greater property share gap among rural couples but a more pronounced wealth gap among urban couples, attributed to rising housing prices in urban areas. The study concludes with a discussion of how seemingly gender-neutral policies can have gendered economic effects by interacting with traditionally gendered societal norms.
You Are the Elite Now: Admission Effects of an Excellence Reform in the Chinese Higher Education System (October 2024) SOFI Working Papers in Labour Economics 5/2024
with Tianze Liu.
Abstract: This paper examines how university applicants in China respond to a government policy that designates specific university-discipline units as centers of excellence. Affecting over 10 million applicants annually, the policy aims to enhance human capital and global competitiveness, potentially improving the quality of professional skills in the workforce. Using a Difference-in-Differences approach, we analyze the policy’s impact at three levels: (1) Within disciplines, we find that the excellence designation increases competition by attracting higher-ranking applicants to designated units; (2) Within universities, we observe spillover effects, with non-designated disciplines also benefiting from increased competition, likely due to students perceiving non-designated disciplines within the same university as excellent; (3) At the university level, institutions with designated disciplines experience a significant rise in overall admission competition compared to those without such designations. Our findings underscore that discipline-specific excellence designations effectively attract higher-ranking applicants to designated disciplines and elevate the university’s overall competitiveness. The spillover effects suggest that students perceive an institution-wide enhancement of quality, possibly due to shared resources and administration. Consequently, students may be strategically responding to both specific and general signals of excellence, anticipating employer preferences for graduates from these recognized institutions regardless of discipline.