團隊

We exploit the implementation of a rural pension policy in China to estimate the average rural-to-urban migration cost for workers affected by the policy and the average underlying sectoral productivity difference. Our estimates, based on a large panel data set, reveal significant migration costs and substantial sectoral productivity differences, with sorting playing a minor role in accounting for sectoral labor income gaps. We construct and structurally estimate a general equilibrium household model with endogenous labor supply and migration. The results of this model align with the reduced-form findings and illustrate how the rural pension policy influences migration, GDP, and welfare through improving within-household labor allocation. Counterfactual analyses based on the model show that the positive effects of the policy remain even if migration costs were significantly lower, and that scaling up the rural pension policy would lead to even larger improvements in labor allocation, GDP, and welfare.

Using variations in the timing of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) across rural Chinese counties, we examine its effects on eldercare mode, child investment, and son preference. Our findings are three-fold: (1) After the introduction of NRPS, married sons are less likely to live with and provide care for their parents, while married daughters show no significant change in their caregiving behavior; (2) Parents reduce the brideprice for their sons but not the dowry for their daughters; (3) The sex ratio at birth becomes more balanced, indicating a reduction in son preference. These results suggest that public pension programs can significantly influence traditional family dynamics, including eldercare modes and cultural norms around gender preference.

This study estimates the direct and spillover effects of a free education programme on educational outcomes in rural China. We find that, although the programme encourages more eligible children to attend secondary school, it also leads to a decrease in high school enrolment among ineligible girls with eligible siblings, as they are more likely to choose work instead. In the long run, males exposed to free education have more years of schooling than their non-exposed counterparts. However, such effect is not found among females. This disparity suggests that a gender-neutral policy may have an asymmetric effect between males and females because of spillover effects through intra-household resource allocation.