This paper estimates the value of social identity. We conduct an experiment where individuals are either exposed to standard financial incentives or to social identity incentives to put effort on a task, from which we back out the incentive value of social identity. The experimental setting concerns an important real life problem: how to motivate individuals with opioid use disorder (OUD) to increase days of attendance of methadone maintenance treatment clinics (MMT) in a large city in China? Individuals are either exposed to individual financial rewards to increased attendance (financial incentive treatment), or they are told that they are part of a team made up of either high attendance or low attendance individuals (social identity treatment), although they do not know who their team members are and never interact with them. In this experiment the impact on attendance of acquiring a high attendance social identity is at least as large as the impact of financial incentives.

Do children benefit when parents understand them better? We evaluate a class-randomized “test–feedback” intervention that gave parents of nearly 4,000 adolescents personalized information about their children’s abilities and interests. Six months later, the intervention reduced CES-D scores by 0.12 standard deviations and depression by 5 percentage points. It also improved parental belief alignment, reduced excessive expectations and stress, and raised self-esteem. Average test-score effects were small but masked sharp stage differences: treatment increased achievement by 0.12 standard deviations among students in the first year of middle or high school, but reduced it by 0.07–0.09 standard deviations among students in the second year. These differences were largest among students with worse baseline mental health or high parental expectations. Better parental understanding improves well-being but may have stage-dependent academic effects.

According to UNESCO, one-third of the world’s youths are victims of bullying, which deteriorates academic performance and mental health, and increases suicide ideation and the risk of committing suicide. This paper analyzes a four-month parent-directed intervention de- signed to foster empathy in middle schoolers in China. Our implementation and evaluation study enrolled 2,246 seventh and eighth graders and their parents, whom we assigned, at the classroom level, to the control or intervention condition randomly. We measured, before and after the in- tervention, parental investments, children’s empathy, and self-reported bullying perpetration and victimization incidents. Our analyses show that, in the short run, the intervention increased invest- ments and empathy. More importantly, the program also indirectly reduced bullying incidents. In the longer run, additional evidence suggests that the reduction in bullying persisted for one year. The program also moved up treated students’ percentile rank in the high school entrance exam by 1.4 in two years. We measured costs and found that it costs $16.30 for our intervention to reduce one bullying incident. Our study offers a scalable and low-cost strategy that can inform public policy on bullying prevention in other similar settings.

The phenomenon of parents’ Middle-School Blues is widespread yet often overlooked. We find that parental mental health is “V-shaped” throughout children’s developmental stages, reaching its nadir during middle school. We then leverage data from a four-month parental involvement program on empathy and positive parenting. We find the program has a significant positive effect on parental mental health, measured by GHQ-12 score, by 0.17 standard deviation. The effect is large enough to help parents combat Middle-School Blues. We attribute the program’s effect on mental health to the improvement in parental skills, time inputs, and children’s non-cognitive ability. The mediation analysis suggests that these three factors interact and account for over 62% of the total program effects, and that the improvement in parental skills is the key driver of promoting parental mental health.

This paper examines the impact of a randomized experiment in Macedonia in which program applicants were assigned to receive a job interview and the employers were subsidized when job and worker were matched. The interview led to more than 25 percentage point increase in employment in the first 6 months, and the average effect persists, at around 15 percentage points after the subsidies has expired.

In many societies, parents prefer sons over daughters, but the well-being effects of child gender, especially in later life, are less studied. Using the latest two waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), this paper evaluates the impacts of having daughters on older parents' subjective well-being (SWB) in China, which has a rapidly aging population and the traditional preference for sons. Studying the cohort of parents whose child gender is as good as random, we find that having more daughters promotes older parents' SWB, especially overall life satisfaction, satisfaction with health, and satisfaction with children. Our results suggest that the increase in SWB is achieved through better health, more financial support from daughters, more spending on leisure and a lower probability of working. The positive SWB effects of daughters are found to be more salient among more vulnerable groups, including those who are older, less educated, and with fewer children. 

Is the rising perceived cost of childrearing discouraging fertility? How do people’s fertility plans respond to potential fertility subsidies? In two separate large field survey experiments in China, we answer both questions and propose potential interventions for boosting fertility in developing countries. Interestingly, we find that people with one or no child expect high costs of a second or third child, while people with more than one child manage to raise children inexpensively. TOT estimates show that a higher perceived cost of child leads to lower birth planning, suggesting that the high perceived cost for the low-birth population partially contributes to the low fertility rate. 

Bullying is on the rise among young people but the cause is unknown. This paper provides a first empirical study on the cause of being a bully by focusing on the within-class socioeconomic status (SES) inequality.