Inequality of opportunity in household income,China 2002–2018

This study contributes to the literature on inequality of opportunity (IOp) in China by covering a longer and more recent span of time, employing better measures of given characteristics, and analyzing IOp for household income per capita with comparisons to individual income. Furthermore, it analyzes how IOp differs between the rural- and urban-born, and how IOp changes across birth cohorts and with age. We use 2002, 2013 and 2018 data from the Chinese Household Income Study and focus on income inequality among working-age persons. We find that IOp in China declined, especially between 2013 and 2018. In 2002 the large contributors to IOp were region, hukou type at birth, and parents' characteristics. In 2018 the contributions of region, hukou type at birth and parents' occupation had decreased, but that of parents' education had increased. We find that IOp is larger among those born in rural than urban China. Furthermore, IOP's contribution to total inequality within each birth cohort is highest earlier in individuals' work lives and declines with age. IOp is higher for older than younger birth cohorts, reflecting that younger cohorts have benefited from increased opportunities associated with China's reforms and opening up.     

Geography and educational inequality in China

Since the 1980s, educational reforms in China have decentralized administration and finance and privatized costs. These changes have emerged in the context of rapid economic growth and rising regional economic disparities. The reforms have mobilized new resources in support of education, but they have also exacerbated regional disparities in funding for schools. Analyses of trends in school finance and expenditures have emerged, but detailed studies of the shifting ties between geography and educational outcomes in the population have not.Using 2000 census data on year and location of birth and educational attainment, we begin to address this gap. We compare the links between birth province and educational outcomes across 5-year birth cohorts to illuminate trends in region-based inequalities. Results show that the percent of variation in years of schooling explained by birth province declined for cohorts born through the early 1960s, and then increased thereafter.Additional analyses use a dissimilarity index to characterize the strength of the link between geography and access to each level of schooling. This index indicates that the link between geography and access to primary school has greatly increased across cohorts, as the few without access to primary school are ever more concentrated in poor areas. The link between birth province and access to subsequent levels of schooling shows mixed trends through cohorts born in the early 1960s: stability for junior high school and a weakening trend for senior high school and college. Thereafter, the dissimilarity index increased, substantially for junior high school and slightly for senior high school and college.Results attest to the enduring significance of geography as an educational stratifier in China. More broadly, results suggest the importance of regional inequalities in conditioning the relationship between development and educational stratification.     

The impact of diabetes insurance mandates on infant health

Among the factors thought to contribute to lagging improvements in infant health in recent years are increasing obesity and diabetes prevalence among women of childbearing age. This article uses a difference‐in‐difference‐in‐difference empirical strategy to investigate the impact of mandated insurance coverage for diabetes on adverse pregnancy outcomes. Among educated women, who have high rates of coverage through private insurance that is subject to insurance mandates, diabetes mandates are associated with a reduction in low birth weight and premature birth prevalence. These gains are concentrated among older women and are larger for African‐Americans. There is a weaker effect on the prevalence of high birth weight, potentially because of the deleterious effects of an increased probability of pregnancy weight gain in excess of 35 pounds among diabetic women in states with mandates.     

When left-behind children become adults and parents: The long-term human capital consequences of parental absence in China

This study examines the long-term effects of childhood left-behind experience on human capital outcomes across two generations in China. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find evidence that adults with left-behind experience in early life have fewer schooling years, lower cognitive test scores, a lower Big Five personality traits index, but a higher internal locus of control. Meanwhile, they are more likely to report underweight, chronic diseases, depression, and lower levels of perceived health and happiness. Our findings of the negative consequences on personality traits and health outcomes are robust to a battery of specification and validity tests. These effects also differ markedly by adults' gender, birth cohort, hukou status, and the characteristics of left-behind experience (i.e., type, timing, and duration). Further, our results also suggest a potential intergenerational transmission mechanism in which human capital loss is induced by one's early-life exposure to parental absence. Specifically, one's childhood left-behind experience is also inversely associated with their offspring's outcomes such as Big Five noncognitive skills, birth weight, and height-for-age z-score. Although adults with left-behind experience are inclined to spend more time with offspring compared with their non-left-behind counterparts, they also tend to have significantly poorer household socioeconomic outcomes and less offspring educational investment.     

The effects of exposure to high temperatures during pregnancy on adolescent mental health: Evidence from China

This paper provides the first study to explore the relationship between exposure to ambient temperatures during pregnancy and adolescent mental health in China. The results show that experiencing one more hot day relative to local historical contemporaneous average values during pregnancy significantly increases the likelihood of mental health disorders in adolescence. The impact is larger in the first and second trimesters. Individuals born in the northern region and whose mothers work in agriculture are more vulnerable to high temperatures. Prenatal exposure to hot days is more harmful to the mental health of older adolescents. Additionally, the adverse effects are similar for both men and women and individuals with rural and urban hukou. Biological effects, income effects, and human capital accumulation might be three operative channels of the impact. These findings add to the evidence on the lasting health effects of early life exposure to climatic shocks and call for policy interventions during pregnancy.     

Relative deprivation and health revisited: New evidence from middle-aged and older adults in rural China

The critical role of income in individual health is not only reflected in the direct effect of income but also derived from the relative income levels within cohorts. This study first constructs relative deprivation indicators to measure the relative income levels of rural households by taking village-level households as the reference group. Using the data from the four waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2011–2018), we apply a panel event study approach to detect the impact of relative deprivation on the health status of rural middle-aged and older adults. The estimation results show the significantly negative and persistent effects of deterioration in relative deprivation on the physical and mental health outcomes of these adults. In rural China, the impact of relative deprivation on individual health shows significant age and wealth differences, but no significant gender differences are observed. Meanwhile, local collective culture plays important roles. The findings have important implications for the government to improve public health policies and promote healthy aging.     

Internet use and fertility behavior among reproductive-age women in China

Using longitudinal data from the 2014–2018 China Family Panel Studies, we investigate the impact of internet use (IU) on fertility among reproductive-age women. We find that IU reduces the number of children born, with more pronounced effects among those with a moderate level of education, those aged 16–19, rural residents, and those who are married. These results are robust to alternative IU measures and a series of estimation approaches that control for endogeneity. IU participation affects the number of children born through decreased marital satisfaction, changed attitudes toward traditional gender roles, a reduction in the importance placed on ancestral lines, deteriorated health and reduced fertility preferences.     

Maternal Depression and the Production of Infant Health

Depression is most prevalent among women of childbearing age and among low-income women, and the medical literature shows it to have adverse effects on infant health. Yet maternal depression has been overlooked in economic studies of infant health production. This research incorporates maternal depressive symptoms into a standard infant health production model and estimates both structural and reduced-form birth weight equations using samples of non-Hispanic white and black women from the National Maternal and Infant Health Survey. A byproduct of this research is an empirical investigation into factors associated with maternal depressive symptoms. All results show that depressive symptoms have a negative effect on birth weight and that they may operate through several channels such as smoking and prenatal care.     

Intergenerational transmission of education: The case of rural China

The intergenerational transmission of education has received considerable attention in recent empirical research in many countries. However, the research on intergenerational transmission of education in China is still relatively rare. This paper investigates the impact of parental schooling on their children's schooling in rural China using the data collected by the authors themselves. Our results show that (i) the intergenerational transmission of education in rural China is not as high as those have been reported in the literature for several other countries;(ii) There exists significant transmission effect of education in the subgroup born after the 1980s, but not for those who were born in the year of 1980 onward. The results also stand up to several different tests and robustness checks. Our findings suggest that promoting the equal education opportunity and investing in children of disadvantaged group will have long-term effects for the accumulation of human capital. China can promote increasing gains for its acquisition of human capital, and tap into this foundation for sustainable growth and development in the future.     

A Tale of Two Armies: Comparative Growth in the Mirror of the First World War

Soldiers born during the late nineteenth century were taller in Australia than in Canada. A widening of the gap for those born in the 1890s supports the more optimistic interpretation of Australia's 1890s depression and is consistent with the ‘hazardous growth’ hypothesis of an inverse relationship between economic change and public health. The rural–urban stature gradient was steeper in Australia although Canada had greater stature inequality in all other dimensions. Native-born soldiers were taller than the British-born in both countries. We see no evidence of selective migration effects that would imply feedback from stature to growth.     

Toddlers,teenagers, and terminal heights: the importance of puberty for male adult stature,Flanders, 1800–76

Does adult stature capture conditions at birth or at some other stage in the growth cycle? Anthropometrics is lauded as a method for capturing net nutritional status over all the growing years. However, it is frequently assumed that conditions at birth were most influential. Was this true for historical populations? This article examines the heights of Flemish men born between 1800 and 1876 to tease apart which moments of growth were most sensitive to disruption and reflected in final heights. It exploits two proximate crises in 1846–9 and 1853–6 as shocks that permit age effects to be revealed. These are affirmed through a study of food prices and death rates. Both approaches suggest a shift of the critical moment away from the first few years of life and towards the adolescent growth spurt as the most influential on terminal stature. Furthermore, just as height is accumulated over the growing years, conditions influencing growth need to be understood cumulatively. Economic conditions at the time of birth were not explanatory, but their collective effects from ages 11 to 18 years were strongly influential. At these ages, both health and nutrition mattered, to varying degrees. Teenagers, rather than toddlers, should be our guides to the past.     

Birth order and intergenerational income mobility in Japan: Is the first-born child different?

This study examines how birth order affects intergenerational income mobility (IGM) in Japan, focusing on the difference in IGM between firstborn and later-born children. The elasticities of sons’ income with respect to fathers’ income are separately estimated for sons who are firstborn and sons who are later born by family size using a two-sample, two-stage least squares approach. For sons born in 1926–1981, this study finds that in families with four or more children, intergenerational income elasticity (IGE) for firstborn sons is substantially and significantly higher than that for later-born sons. However, no significant birth order effects are found in households with two or three children.     

Large-scale school meal programs and student health: Evidence from rural China

Reducing urban-rural gaps in child health is one of the most difficult challenges faced by many countries. This paper evaluates the impact of a large-scale school meal program in rural China on the health and nutritional status of students aged 6–16 in compulsory education. We use data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey corresponding to four pre-treatment years (2004, 2006, 2009, and 2011) and one post-treatment year (2015) and find that program participation is, on average, associated with a higher child height-for-age. The impacts are larger among students in a better health condition but small or not significant among the most disadvantaged. We do not observe heterogeneous effects across several individual and household characteristics. We also find positive but not significant effects on Body Mass Index-for-age and weight-for-age. The results suggest that NIP partially improved students' health over the first years of implementation, but more support is needed to achieve broader impacts that effectively reach all vulnerable students.     

The health capacity to work at older ages in urban China

Tapping into the older workforce is a potential economic solution to population aging, but its feasibility depends on the health capacity to work among older people. Existing estimations in OECD countries involve establishing the relationship between work and health on a younger cohort, extrapolating the relationship to older individuals, and deriving the excess health capacity as the difference between predicted and actual employment rates. However, benchmarking on the younger cohort is sub-optimal because the observable retirement-health relationship changes with age. The dual nature of the Chinese social security system provides us with a relatively neat benchmark, allowing us to estimate the excess health capacity among urban workers benchmarking on rural residents in the same age range. Using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this choice, combined with other fine-tuning, yields significantly lower but still substantial excess capacity among older urban workers than benchmarking against younger cohorts. Altogether, among urban Chinese aged 45–69, 31.2 million extra workers can potentially be added to the workforce.     

Identifying income heterogeneity determinants using the method of moments quantile regression

Prior studies have typically concentrated on poverty status to determine anti-poverty measures; however, this approach cannot sufficiently detect income heterogeneity. This study employs quantile regression for panel data to investigate the Korean Labour and Income Panel Study 2003–2020. Moreover, it adopts both household- and community-level variables and separates demographic groups as working-age and older adults, considering Korea's severe old-age poverty. The findings indicate that household-level characteristics, such as householder's gender, physical health, and employment status, present heterogeneous effects across the income distribution. Second, low-income households are more vulnerable to regional economic and labour market downturns than high-income neighbours. Lastly, although the National Pension, a backbone of the public pension system, provides limited supports for retirees because it was introduced much later than other countries, it assists low-income old adults more effectively. Therefore, this study suggests more tailored redistribution measures, considering heterogeneous effects of household- and community-level environments, and a further expansion of the National Pension to mitigate old-age poverty.     

Impact of urban-rural health insurance integration on health care: Evidence from rural China

In recent years, Chinese local governments have experimented with integrating the social health insurance system segmented between rural and urban areas to unify the administration, policy, and funds of various health insurance programs. In this study, we take advantage of the staggered implementation of the urban-rural health insurance integration across cities over time to examine the impacts of the integration on rural residents' health care utilization and health outcomes. Based on an original city-year level policy dataset and the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) for the years 2011, 2013, and 2015, we find that the integration significantly increases the middle-aged and older rural residents' inpatient care utilization and this positive effect is particularly salient in poor areas. Moreover, we find that the positive policy effect of integration is attributed to enhanced health insurance benefits, such as a higher reimbursement rate for inpatient care. However, the integration has limited impacts on the middle-aged and older rural residents' health outcomes. This study reveals the partial success of urban-rural health insurance integration to reduce health care inequality in China.     

Health,education, and economic growth in China: Empirical findings and implications

This empirical analysis examines the augmented Mankiw, Romer and Weil's model which considers both health and education in human capital in the framework of Chinese economy. We consider the relationship between per capita real GDP growth and the physical capital, human capital, and health investment in the production function. Panel data models are used in the estimation based on the provincial data from 1978–2005. The empirical evidence shows that both health and education have positive significant effects on economic growth. The results also show that the interaction of health and education stock will not reduce their impact on growth and there is perhaps a trade-off between two forms of human capital investment.     

Dragon year superstition,birth timing,and neonatal health outcomes

According to Chinese astrology, each lunar year is symbolized by a zodiac animal, including the Dragon, which represents auspiciousness, power and greatness. Based on high-quality administrative data from birth certificates in Shenzhen, China, we first show that a considerable number of births are shifted from one week before the Dragon year to one week after the Dragon year begins, mainly through vaginal and elective C-sections. Then, we estimate the causal health effects of delaying births but do not find any significant results, as measured by birth weight, Apgar scores, and neonatal mortality.     

Health investment,physical capital accumulation,and economic growth

This paper analyzes the effect of health investment, and hence of health capital, on physical capital accumulation and long-run economic growth in an extended Ramsey model with an Arrow–Romer production function and a Grossman (1972) utility function. The paper concludes that economic growth is related to both the health growth rate and the health level. While growth in health capital always facilitates economic growth, the gross effect of health level on the rate of economic growth depends on how it affects physical capital accumulation. If the negative effect of health on economic growth through its influence on physical capital accumulation is not taken into consideration, then health level has a positive effect on the rate of economic growth by improving the efficiency of labor production. However, since health investment may crowd out physical capital investment and thus influence physical capital accumulation, excessive investment in health may have a negative effect on economic growth. Empirical tests of these theoretical hypotheses using panel data from individual provinces of China produce results that are consistent with our theoretical conclusions.     

Effects of cohort size on college premium: Evidence from China's higher education expansion

In this paper, we document the lesser-known heterogeneous trends of college/non-college earnings premium across age groups from 1995 to 2013 in China. Specifically, the college premium in 2013 for the younger group (age 25–34) was about 30 percentage points, similar to the level in 1995, while the college premium in 2013 for the older group (age 45–54) increased to 50 percentage points, nearly double that of 1995. To attribute these divergent trends of the college premium to the changes in the relative size of college workers, we use the model by Card and Lemieux (2001), which incorporates imperfect substitution between similarly educated workers in different age cohorts. Due to the distinctions of these trends in China, our identification is free of the overestimation issue that the existing studies suffer. Our results are similar to those in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Japan. Holding the age cohort and survey year constant, a one unit increase in log relative size of college workers is associated with about 10 percentage points decrease in college/non-college premium and about 18 percentage points decrease in college/high school premium. We further find that the negative effect is much more substantial among the new entrants (age 25–29) than experienced workers (age 30–54). By this pattern, we demonstrate that the new labor market entrants are more sensitive to their own cohort size and argue that the confounding ability composition effect should not be a serious issue.