Research

"Kinship, Social Preferences and Voting in Rural China: A Lab-in-the-Field Experiment"

Abstract: Economists have come to understand that human choices are not only driven by self-interest but also "social preferences" -- a person's concern over resources allocated to other people. Moreover, such preferences may be affected by the environment in which such choices are made, especially social networks and social pressure. I performed a lab-in-the- field experiment in rural China, where I recruited 162 Chinese farmers to vote in 7 variants of allocation games in randomly assigned groups and with real-world social contacts, with and without pressure. I find that social network and social pressure combined have significant yet heterogeneous effects on social preferences. The source of heterogeneity include the assignment with in-group or out-group members, membership in dominant lineages, individual characteristics as defined by age and gender, and the degree of kinship between individuals within a social group. Our study not only provide empirical evidence for the social preference theories but also urges policy makers to be careful in choosing an appropriate voting method. In addition, constraining the power of dominant lineage and having better educated villagers more involved in village affairs could be welfare improving.

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"Labor Market Outcomes with Heterogeneous Preferences and Search Frictions: The Case of China"

Abstract: Neither Rosen's classical compensating differential model nor newly developed search models could explain the particular pattern of wage and job characteristics distributions in China, where migrant and urban workers coexist and dominate different sectors. In the theoretical part of this paper, we expand the model by Lang and Majumdar (2003) to show that wages need not be compensating when preferences are heterogeneous, and that the group more averse to undesirable working conditions need not earn less when reservation utilities differ and/or when employers practice taste-based discrimination. In the empirical part, we substantiate the assumption in our theoretical modeling that urban workers are more averse to undesirable working conditions using a discrete choice experiment, where 225 workers in China made hypothetical choices between jobs characterized by different wage levels and working conditions. We backed out preference parameters and willingness to accept measures for job attributes. We nd that consistent with our assumption, urban workers need to be compensated more to accept outdoor jobs and jobs in second line cities. We also find that migrant workers have more dispersed preferences that vary with personal characteristics such as gender and education.

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"Parental Retirement, Care-giving, and Female Labor Supply in China: a Regression Discontinuity Approach" (with Qi Wu, Peking University)

Abstract: Aging and an increasing retired population are a global challenge. Previous studies suggest that retirement affects economic behaviors of the retiree and his or her spouse, including consumption, health outcome, and time use. However, little is known about the intergenerational effects of parental retirement on adult children. This paper studies the effects of parental retirement on adult children's labor supply through intergenerational time and monetary transfer. We exploit the mandatory retirement age in China as the cut-off point and apply a regression discontinuity (RD) approach to four waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) Dataset. Our findings suggest that parental retirement reduces adult children's annual hours of labor supply by 3 to 4 percent. This reduction is especially pronounced for female children. We find that the reduction can be explained by parents' increasing demand for time and care from children due to the significant drop in parents' self-rated health upon retirement. Although both male and female children increased their monetary and time transfers to parents, we find that parents tend to make more transfers to sons compared to daughters. Daughters are also more likely to make transfers to parents after they retire, both in terms of money and in terms of time. We therefore urge policy makers to increase formal eldercare provisions and provide workplace amenities such as flexible working hours, especially for female employees.