Publications (81)

In this paper we describe the major trends in China’s income inequality over the past 40 years and explain them as the outcome of four interleaved stories. The first story is a standard development story characterized by structural change, market development, labour absorption, and the...

We investigate the evolution of wage levels, wage inequality, and wage determinants among urban residents in China using China Household Income Project data from 1988, 1995, 2002, 2007, and 2013. Average wage grew impressively between each pair of years. Wage inequality had long been on the...

By using the five waves of the China Household Income Project surveys conducted during 1988–2013, this paper investigates long-term changes in income inequality and poverty in China. Income inequality rose before 2007 and then fell by a small amount. The main reason for the rise in...

Myrdal did not cover China in his Asian Drama. If he did, he would have been most likely pessimistic about China, as he was about other Asian countries in his book. However, China has achieved miraculous growth since the transition from a planned economy to a market economy at the end of 1978...

Access to social services in China is connected to a system of household registration (Hukou system) determined by place of origin with difficult geographical transferability. As a consequence, a vast majority of rural-to-urban migrants do not have access to public health services in urban...

We examine the heterogeneous and dynamic impact of China’s New Rural Pension Scheme on intergenerational wealth dependence using a nationally representative longitudinal household survey covering the period 2011–13. We adopt an instrumental quantile regression–discontinuity...

I first document that the introduction of the One Child Policy dramatically increased sex selection in certain regions, and that the Chinese government responded to this by allowing parents who had a daughter as their first child to try for a second child. Next, I show that the increase in...

Objective: To assess the characteristics and incidence of medical litigation in China and the potential usefulness of the records of such litigation as an indicator of healthcare quality. Methods: We investigated 13,620 cases of medical malpractice litigation that ended between 2010 and 2015...

This paper evaluates the impact of Chinese import penetration on the innovation of Vietnamese manufacturing firms from 2011 to 2015, exploiting variations in import exposure by industry specialization and instrumenting for Chinese import penetration using Chinese global exports. Contrary to...

This paper investigates the net impact of birth control policy in China on educational attainment of the partially excluded ethnic minorities. Exploring county-level variation in the value of fines levied for unsanctioned births, we show that more stringent enforcement of the birth control policy...

This paper aims to contribute to understanding the existing knowledge gaps in the linkages of energy, water, and land use in Southeast Asia and explores the political economy of energy transition in the Mekong region (MR). Investigating the struggle over hydropower development and decision-making...

We propose a general taxonomy of the political economy challenges to wind power development and integration, highlighting the implications in terms of actors, interests, and risks. Applying this framework to three functions in China’s electricity sector—planning and project approval,...

China and India will have to radically transform their electric power systems in order to decouple economic growth from unsustainable resource consumption. While the majority of transition literature has focused on the diverse socio-technical factors that could enable such a transformation, more...

China is emerging as perhaps the most globally significant development finance provider, going far beyond concessional foreign aid.With China’s initiatives to create and foster new multi-lateral finance institutions, and to work in terms of large economic landscapes in Africa, Eurasia, and...