A multifaceted poverty reduction program has economic and behavioral consequences.

This paper examines the causal impact of poverty reduction interventions on the social preferences of the poor. A multifaceted poverty reduction program in China provides a setting for the use of a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. The design compares households with base-year income just below a preset criterion, who were more likely to receive the program treatment, with households just above the criterion. Five years after the program's launch, we conducted a lab-in-the-field experiment to measure the distributional preferences of household heads. Combining quasi-random variation from program rules with administrative census and experimental data, we find both economic and behavioral consequences of the program: It increased household income by 50% 5 y later, increased consistency with utility maximization by household heads, and increased their efficiency preference while reducing selfishness and leaving equality preference unchanged. Our findings advance scientific understanding of social preferences formation and highlight a broad perspective in evaluating poverty reduction interventions.

Early-life exposure to hardship increased risk tolerance and entrepreneurship in adulthood with gender differences.

Many entrepreneurs credit their success to early hardship. Here, we exploit geographical differences in the intensity of China's Great Famine to investigate the effect of hardship during formative years on individual personality and engagement in business entrepreneurship. To exclude factors that might confound the relation between famine intensity and entrepreneurship, we model famine intensity by random weather shocks. We find robust evidence that individuals who experienced more hardship were subsequently more likely to become entrepreneurs (defined broadly as self-employed or business owners). Importantly, the increase in entrepreneurship was at least partly due to conditioning rather than selection. Regarding the behavioral mechanism, hardship was associated with greater risk tolerance among men and women but increased business ownership only among men. The gender differences were possibly due to the intricate relationship between a Chinese social norm­men focus more on market work, while women focus more on domestic work­and interspousal risk pooling associated with occupational choices. Scientifically, these findings contribute to a long-standing debate on whether entrepreneurship is due to nature or nurture, particularly how hardship conditions people to be entrepreneurial. The findings also highlight the importance of gender differences in shaping the effect of early-life experience on life cycle outcomes.

Government management capacities and the containment of COVID-19: a repeated cross-sectional study across Chinese cities.

OBJECTIVES: Better understanding of the dynamics of the COVID-19 (2019 novel coronavirus disease) pandemic to curb its spread is now a global imperative. While travel restrictions and control measures have been shown to limit the spread of the disease, the effectiveness of the enforcement of those measures should depend on the strength of the government. Whether, and how, the government plays a role in fighting the disease, however, has not been investigated. Here, we show that government management capacities are critical to the containment of the disease. SETTING: We conducted a statistical analysis based on cross-city comparisons within China. China has undergone almost the entire cycle of the anticoronavirus campaign, which allows us to trace the full dynamics of the outbreak, with homogeneity in standards for statistics recording. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY OUTCOME MEASURES: Outcome measures include city-specific COVID-19 case incidence and recoveries in China. RESULTS: The containment of COVID-19 depends on the effectiveness of the enforcement of control measures, which in turn depends on the local government's management capacities. Specifically, government efficiency, capacity for law enforcement, and the transparency of laws and policies significantly reduce COVID-19 prevalence and increase the likelihood of recoveries. The organisation size of the government, which is not closely related to its capacity for management, has a limited role.

Early Health Shocks, Intra-household Resource Allocation and Child Outcomes.

An open question in the literature is whether families compensate or reinforce the impact of child health shocks. Discussions usually focus on one dimension of child investment. This paper examines multiple dimensions using household survey data on Chinese child twins whose average age is 11. We find that, compared with a twin sibling who did not suffer from negative early health shocks at ages 0-3, the other twin sibling who did suffer negative health shocks received RMB 305 more in terms of health investments, but received RMB 182 less in terms of educational investments in the 12 months prior to the survey. In terms of financial transfers over all dimensions of investment, the family acts as a net equalizer in response to early health shocks for children. We estimate a human capital production function and establish that, for this sample, early health shocks negatively affect child human capital, including health, education, and socioemotional skills. Compensating investments in health as measured by BMI reduce the adverse effects of health shocks by 50%, but exacerbate the adverse impact of shocks on educational attainment by 30%.

Estimating the effect of the one-child policy on the sex ratio imbalance in China: identification based on the difference-in-differences.

In China, the male-biased sex ratio has increased significantly. Because the one-child policy applies only to the Han Chinese but not to minorities, this unique affirmative policy allows us to identify the causal effect of the one-child policy on the increase in sex ratios by using a difference-in-differences (DD) estimator. Using the 1990 census, we find that the strict enforcement of the one-child policy led to 4.4 extra boys per 100 girls in the 1980s, accounting for about 94% of the total increase in sex ratios during this period. The robust tests indicate that the estimated policy effect is not likely confounded by other omitted policy shocks or socioeconomic changes. Moreover, we conduct the DD estimation using both the 2000 census and the 2005 mini-census. Our estimates suggest that the one-child policy resulted in about 7.0 extra boys per 100 girls for the 1991-2005 birth cohorts. The effect of the one-child policy accounts for about 57% and 54% of the total increases in sex ratios for the 1991-2000 and 2001-2005 birth cohorts, respectively.