I use the experience of China's One Child Policy to examine how fertility restrictions affect economic and social outcomes over the lifetime. The One Child Policy imposed a birth quota and heavy penalties for “out-of-plan” births. Using variation in the fertility penalties across provinces over time, I examine how fertility restrictions imposed early in the lives of individuals affected their educational attainment, marriage and fertility decisions, and later life economic outcomes. Exposure to stricter fertility restrictions when young leads to higher education, more white-collar jobs, delayed marriage, and lower fertility. Further consequences include lower rates of residing with the elderly, higher household income, consumption, and saving. Finally, exposure to stricter fertility restrictions in early life increases later life female empowerment as measured by an increase in the fraction of households headed by women, female-oriented consumption, and gender-equal opinions. Overall, fertility restrictions imposed when people are young have powerful effects throughout the life cycle. (JEL classification: H70, I20, J00, O12)

Chinese housing prices rose by over 10 percent per year in real terms between 2003 and 2014, and are now between two and ten times higher than the construction cost of apartments. At the same time, Chinese developers built 100 billion square feet of residential real estate. This boom has been accompanied by a large increase in the number of vacant homes, held by both developers and households. This boom may turn out to be a housing bubble followed by a crash, yet that future is far from certain. The demand for real estate in China is so strong that current prices might be sustainable, especially given the sparse alternative investments for Chinese households, so long as the level of new supply is radically curtailed. Whether that happens depends on the policies of the Chinese government, which must weigh the benefits of price stability against the costs of restricting urban growth. 

This study examines the ethnic identify of the co-authors of over 1.2 million papers with US addresses from 1985 to 2008. It finds a striking change in the ethnic composition of authors, with the proportion with English and European names falling while the proportion of names from China and other developing countries increases. The greater variety of ethnicity is associated with considerable homophily among research teams, as persons of similar ethnicity tend to work together far more frequently than can be explained by chance. The paper identifies a modest negative relation between homophily and the potential scientific contribution of the papers as measured by the impact factor of journals of publication and the number of citations, with the latter attributable to the previous publishing performance of authors. Using a Markov analysis to calculate a steady state rate of homophily, the paper finds that the rates is close to the steady state and thus likely to continue at high levels into the future. The analysis also finds that papers written by authors at different addresses and that cite larger numbers of references are more likely to get into high impact journals and to gain more citations than other papers.

Using a sample of US-based scientific journal articles, I examine the relationship between author surname initials and paper citations, finding that the papers with first authors whose surname initials appear earlier in the alphabet get more citations, and that this effect does not exist for non-first authors. Further analysis shows that the alphabetical order effect is stronger in those fields with longer reference lists, and that such alphabetical bias exists among citations by others and not for self-citations. In addition, estimates also reveal that the alphabetical order effect is stronger when the length of reference lists in citing papers is longer. These findings suggest that the order in reference lists plays an important role in the alphabetical bias.

In this paper, we build on the literature that examines associations between height and health outcomes of the elderly. We investigate the associations of height shrinkage at older ages with socioeconomic status, finding that height shrinkage for both men and women is negatively associated with better schooling, current urban residence, and household per capita expenditures. We then investigate the relationships between pre-shrinkage height, height shrinkage, and a rich set of health outcomes of older respondents, finding that height shrinkage is positively associated with poor health outcomes across a variety of outcomes, being especially strong for cognition outcomes.

This paper explores whether educational attainment has a cognitive reserve capacity in elder life. Using pilot data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS), we examined the impact of education on cognitive abilities at old ages. OLS results showed that respondents who completed primary school obtained 18.2 percent higher scores on cognitive tests than those who did not. We then constructed an instrumental variable (IV) by leveraging China’s Great Famine of 1959e1961 as a natural experiment to estimate the causal effect of education on cognition. Two-stage least squares (2SLS) results provided sound evidence that completing primary school significantly increases cognition scores, especially in episode memory, by almost 20 percent on average. Moreover, Regression Discontinuity (RD) analysis provides further evidence for the causal interpretation, and shows that the effects are different for the different measures of cognition we explored. Our results also show that the Great Famine can result in long-term health consequences through the pathway of losing educational opportunities other than through the pathway of nutrition deprivation.