Research Interests
Labor Economics,
Applied Econometrics
Demographic, Population, and Family Economics
Human Capital
Publications and Forthcoming Papers
Effects of Childhood Peers on Personality Skills, with Shuaizhang Feng and Jun Hyung Kim. Forthcoming at Journal of Labor Economics
Abstract: Do peers in childhood influence the development of noncognitive skills? Despite a large literature on peer effects, peer effects on children's noncognitive skills remain unknown. To answer this question, we use Big Five Inventory measures of personality traits linked to the administrative records of children randomly assigned to primary school classrooms. We find that children exposed to the ``left-behind'' classmates whose parents temporarily migrated away for work become less conscientious, agreeable, and emotionally stable in childhood. We further show suggestive evidence that the convergence in personality traits among friends explain the negative peer effects.
Effects of Temperature Exposures on Early Childhood Cognitive Development and Home Environment, with Wenjie Wu, Jun Hyung Kim and Ai Yue. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 132 (2025), 103162.
Abstract: Daily exposure to suboptimal temperature with inadequate protection can undermine children's development, but evidence is limited in the range of temperature and the set of developmental outcomes. Using a unique panel study in disadvantaged rural communities, we find that children's exposures to low temperature undermine cognitive development during early childhood. In addition, caregiver-child interactions and material investments are lower for households exposed to low temperature, highlighting their limited capacity to adapt and the potential for persistent effects on children's long-term outcomes through home environment. Our findings show the need to account for a broad range of temperature variations when promoting children's development, and propose home environment as a novel policy channel to counter the negative temperature effects on children.
Market Access and Educational Inequality in China, with Lijuan Yin. Journal of Asian Economics 98 (2025), 101927.
Abstract: This paper investigates how globalization affects human capital investment within China's institutional context. We develop a general equilibrium model, incorporating endogenous education choices, to show that while globalization promotes overall human capital formation, it also exacerbates rural-urban college educational inequality due to China’s restrictive household registration (hukou) system. The impact of market access on this disparity varies across regions. Using China Income Project data from 1995 and 2002, we find that a 1 % increase in market access increases the rural-urban higher education gap by 1.2 percentage points. The findings suggest that hukou reform alone will not reduce educational inequality without addressing the land-use issues linked to hukou policies.
The Effects of Childhood Health on Adult Health and SES in China , with James P. Smith, Yan Shen, John Strauss, and Yaohui Zhao. Econ Dev Cult Change 61 (2012):127--56.
Abstract: In this paper, we model the associations of childhood health on adult health and socio-economic status outcomes in China using a new sample of middle aged and older Chinese respondents. Modeled after the American Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), the CHARLS Pilot survey respondents are 45 years and older in two quite distinct provinces—Zhejiang, a high growth industrialized province on the East Coast and Gansu, a largely agricultural and poor province in the West. Childhood health in CHARLS relies on two measures that proxy for different dimensions of health during the childhood years. The first is a retrospective self-evaluation using a standard five-point scale (excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor) of general state of one's health when one was less than 16 years old. The second is adult height believed to be a good measure of levels of nutrition during early childhood and the prenatal period. We relate both these childhood health measures to adult health and SES outcomes during the adult years. We find strong associations of childhood health on adult health outcomes particularly among Chinese women and strong associations with adult BMI particularly for Chinese men.
Health Outcomes and Socio-economic Status Among the Elderly in China: Evidence from the CHARLS Pilot, with John Strauss, Xiaoyan Lei, Albert Park, Yan Shen, James P. Smith, and Yaohui Zhao. Population Aging 3 (2010): 111.
Abstract: We are concerned in this paper with measuring health outcomes among the elderly in Zhejiang and Gansu provinces, China, and examining the relationships between different dimensions of health status and measures of socio-economic status (SES). We are CHARLS pilot data to document health conditions, using a very rich set of health indicators that include both self-reported measures and biomarkers. We also examine correlations between these health outcomes and two important indicators of socio-economic status (SES): education and log of per capita expenditure (log pce), our preferred measure of household resources. In general education tends to be positively correlated with better health outcomes, as it is in other countries. However, unmeasured community influences turn out to be highly important, much more so than one usually finds in other countries. While it is not yet clear which aspects of communities matter and why they matter, we set up an agenda for future research on this topic. We also find a large degree of under-diagnosis of hypertension, a major health problems that afflicts the aged. This implies that the current health system is not well prepared to address the rapid aging of the Chinese population, at least not in Gansu and Zhejiang.
Working Papers
Gender Wage Equality and Unmarried Cohabitation, with Jun Hyung Kim and Shiko Maruyama.
Abstract: Research has shown that the rising education and earnings of women have profoundly impacted marriage formation. However, their implications for cohabitation remain understudied, despite cohabitation becoming an increasingly common family arrangement in today's world. To fill this gap, we first develop a model of partners' negotiation on whether to marry or cohabit. As the wage gap between the partners increases, marriage becomes less attractive to the partner with higher income relative to cohabitation due to the concern of alimony upon divorce, implying a U-shaped relationship between female-to-male relative earnings and the choice of cohabitation over marriage. In contrast, intra-household specialization increases the relative value of marriage as marriage provides protection for commitment, implying an inverse-U relationship. We then investigate these competing predictions by applying a shift-share design to a nationally representative survey in the US. To test these predictions, we use nonlinear models which have been overlooked in past research. We find that cohabitation is more likely relative to marriage for couples with a greater wage gap, consistent with the alimony mechanism. This finding also implies that linearly regressing the marriage status on the gender wage gap may lead to misleading conclusions.
A House for My Family: The Impacts of Down Payment Rate on Marriage and Fertility, with Yuting Bai, Jun Hyung Kim, Shiko Maruyama and Yangyang Zhang.
Abstract: Housing access is a significant determinant of fertility, yet most housing purchases rely heavily on credit. Therefore, credit market policies likely affect fertility, but this connection has not been empirically investigated. We investigate the effects of the down payment rate (DPR) policies on marriage and fertility, exploiting city-year variations in the DPRs in China from 2008 to 2020. We find that an increase in the DPR reduces the likelihood of first births significantly within the next three years, while housing prices show no direct effect on fertility. The adverse effects of the higher DPRs are more pronounced among women who are less-educated, over 25 years of age, and born with a rural hukou, suggesting that the higher DPRs exacerbate credit constraints for marginal homebuyers. In contrast, neither the DPR nor housing prices significantly affect the probability of first marriage. These findings underscore the critical role of housing market policies in shaping demographic outcomes.
Maternity Leave Expansion and Fertility: The Role of Three Margins, with Yuting Bai, Shiko Maruyama and Yangyang Zhang.
Abstract: Fertility benefit is often explicitly stipulated as one of the goals of maternity leave (ML) expansions, as ML reduces the cost of childbearing. This paper examines the effect of ML duration on fertility, offering the first such evidence from developing countries. Moreover, we argue that the fertility effect can be decomposed into three margins -- first marriage, first birth, and higher-order births, and evaluate the ML effect on each margin. We also differentiate two types of ML, one covered by maternity insurance vs. one funded by employers, a question of policy importance due to potential discrimination by employers. Two-way fixed-effect models are estimated to quantify the effect of ML duration by exploiting rich variations of ML duration across provinces and over time as well as detailed eligibility rules that provide within-province variations. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies, we find three main results as follows. First, an additional week of ML increases the rate of first birth by 0.473 percentage points per annum while having no significant effect on marriage or higher-order birth. Second, the funding source of ML makes no statistically significant differences, indicating no strong discrimination by employers. Third, the positive effect on first births is particularly pronounced among younger women with lower educational attainment in rural areas working in the private sector. Our results indicate the potential of targeted ML policies for fertility promotion.
Work in Progress
Child Skill Production with Parents’ Time and Money Investments, with Shuaizhang Feng, James J. Heckman, and Jun Hyung Kim.
The Role of Personality Traits in Children’s Economic Preferences, with Shuaizhang Feng, Yujie Han and James J. Heckman.
Children’s IQ, Personalities, and Economic Preferences and Their STEM Outcomes: Evidence from Mianzhu Data, with Shuaizhang Feng, Yujie Han and James J. Heckman.
Robot Adoption and Human Capital Accumulation in China, with Lijuan Yin and Chaoqun Zhan.
The Impact of Rural Financial Development on Non-Agriculture Employment and Migration in China, with Mingmei Liu.
The Impact of Marriage Tax Bonus and Penalty on Marital Decisions in the U.S., with Zhuoyu Qiu.