Embedded Files
A vintage poster features a woman working in a factory, with Chinese text: "Working with automation machines makes the task easy."
Abstract: Until the early 1990s, jobs were assigned by the government in urban China, and education opportunities were limited. Under these constraints, talented people, especially women, may not have been educated or assigned to occupations that suited their abilities best, resulting in a misallocation of human capital. Over the years, market-oriented reforms, such as abolishing the job assignment system and expanding college education, have changed people’s occupational and educational choices significantly.
This paper investigates the macroeconomic consequences of market-oriented reforms between 1990 and 2010. I build a quantitative model of occupational and educational choice with wedges to measure the degrees of misallocation.
I find that market-oriented reforms have significantly reduced misallocations. Without any market-oriented reforms, 19% of young people in 2010 would have chosen different occupations. Consequently, the human capital of the young cohort would have been 1.6% lower, and economic output would have been 0.8% lower.
What Drives the Decline in Female Labor Supply in Urban China?
What Drives the Decline in Female Labor Supply in Urban China?
(job market paper, link)
Abstract: From 1989 to 2009, female labor force participation (FLFP) in urban China decreased by nearly 10 percentage points when China was growing fast. This decline is driven by significant falls in the participation of young and married women across cohorts even though their earnings were increasing. This paper investigates the quantitative importance of multiple channels to explain the fall in FLFP across cohorts with a household life-cycle model in which married women endogenously decide whether to work. The counterfactual experiments show that a widening gender pay gap can explain 50-80% of the decline in the participation of women without college education between the 1950 and 1970 cohorts. Increased childcare cost accounts for most of the remaining decline. Increased assortative mating has heterogeneous effects across education levels and decreased fertility only increases participation marginally. The difference in FLFP between the 1950 and 1970 cohorts could explain around 40% of the declined FLFP over the years. (link)
Abstract: We study the effect of trade liberalization on firms’ monopsony power in the labor market. We estimate firm-specific markdowns from production data in the manufacturing industry and document the trends in China between 1998 and 2007. Taking China’s entry to the WTO as a policy shock, we use a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach combined with an instrumental variable (IV) strategy to show that a one percentage point decrease in input tariff reduces markdown by 1.9-2.2%. We explain the pattern by constructing shift-share trade shocks and find that the number of firms increases in regions more exposed to export, which is associated with lower monopsony power.
Unintended Demographic Effects of Educational Affirmative Action in China (prepare to submit, with Huali Wu and Kaihao Liu)
Unintended Demographic Effects of Educational Affirmative Action in China (prepare to submit, with Huali Wu and Kaihao Liu)
Abstract: Affirmative action aims to support underrepresented groups but can also shape how exogamous families identify their children. Leveraging the 1999 higher education expansion in China, this paper examines the unintended demographic consequences of affirmative action in college admission for ethnic minority students. A difference-in-differences analysis shows that the expansion increased the probability of minority identification by 5% (equivalent to roughly 15,000 minority newborns every year) among children of Han fathers and minority mothers (Han–Minority families), with no significant effects for those with minority fathers and Han mothers. Event-study estimates for Han–Minority families reveal a gendered pattern with pronounced impact for boys. Within-household and Province-level analyses further confirm that ethnic affirmative action has shaped ethnic identity choice.
In China, ethnic minorities are not very distinguishable from the Han people in appearance
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse