Research
Working Papers
From Son to State, from State to Son: China’s Rural Pension across Three Generations
Old-age support in rural China was long the private obligation of adult children; in 2016 a unified national pension gave it a public counterpart, a monthly benefit at sixty regardless of past contributions. Using the age-sixty eligibility cutoff in a difference-in-differences design across three national surveys, we trace the pension through three generations of rural households. Pension receipt raises grandparents’ care of grandchildren by eight percentage points. Parents, in turn, stay away longer: children spend 1.4 fewer months a year with their fathers and 1.6 fewer with their mothers. More children receive homework help from grandparents, and conflict between parents and children becomes more frequent; both changes are concentrated among boys. What the household gained economically, the grandchild partly paid in childhood.
When She Outranks Him: Gender Norms in Marriage Markets and Households
This paper examines how gender norms in China, South Korea, and the United States limit the returns to women’s rising education in marriage. Marriages where the wife has more education than her husband form less often than the singles pool predicts, a penalty the Choo and Siow (2006) framework separates from educational mismatch. The penalty falls almost entirely on China’s college-educated wives. In China, within marriage, a wife who earns more than her husband does less of the housework only where he does not hold a traditional norm. The penalty has declined in the US and is still declining in Korea and China, more slowly than women’s schooling has risen.
Research Interests
Development economics
Economic development, migration, social protection, and household responses to public policy.
Gender economics
Gender norms, inequality, and the allocation of work within households and labor markets.
Labor economics
Labor markets, human capital, occupational choice, and inequality.