Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

What is the impact of China's One-Child Policy on the labor market outcomes of the only children that it engendered? This paper quantifies the wage income gap between only children and their peers (i.e. those with siblings), and uncovers the channels that underlie it. We find that only children...

Citizens' preference for redistribution determines many key political economy outcomes. In this project, we aim to understand how do ancestors' redistributive experiences affect the descendants' preference for redistribution. We conduct a survey experiment under the historical backdrop of the...

In this paper, we examine the issue of consumption insurance in the context of urban China, where the wage structure and social security system changed dramatically during the 1990s. Using a national representative household survey from 1992 to 2003, we construct a pseudo panel dataset to study...

Using a simple game-theoretical model, this paper provides a new explanation for why large firms in developing economies may willingly pay higher wages than market wage rate. We show that large firms can strategically create entry barriers to the modern sector by setting high wage standards....