Yuyu Chen

Evidence on the impact of sustained exposure to air pollution on life expectancy from China’s Huai River policy

This papers findings suggest that an arbitrary Chinese policy that greatly increases total suspended particulates (TSPs) air pollution is causing the 500 million residents of Northern China to lose more than 2.5 billion life years of life expectancy. The quasi-experimental empirical approach is based on China’s Huai River policy, which provided free winter heating via the provision of coal for boilers in cities north of the Huai River but denied heat to the south. Using a regression discontinuity design based on distance from the Huai River, we find that ambient concentrations of TSPs are about 184 μg/m3 [95% confidence interval (CI): 61, 307] or 55% higher in the north. Further, the results indicate that life expectancies are about 5.5 y (95% CI: 0.8, 10.2) lower in the north owing to an increased incidence of cardiorespiratory mortality. More generally, the analysis suggests that long-term exposure to an additional 100 μg/m3 of TSPs is associated with a reduction in life expectancy at birth of about 3.0 y (95% CI: 0.4, 5.6).

Mother's Education and Child Health: Is There a Nurturing Effect?

In this paper, we examine the effect of maternal education on the health of young children by using a large sample of adopted children from China. As adopted children are genetically unrelated to the nurturing parents, the educational effect on them is most likely to be the nurturing effect. We find that the mothers education is an important determinant of the health of adopted children even after we control for income, the number of siblings, health environments, and other socioeconomic variables. Moreover, the effect of the mothers education on the adoptee sample is similar to that on the own birth sample, which suggests that the main effect of the mothers education on child health is in post-natal nurturing. We also find suggestive evidence that the effect is causal. Our work provides new evidence to the general literature that examines the determinants of health and that examines the intergenerational immobility of socioeconomic status.

Does health insurance coverage lead to better health and educational outcomes? Evidence from rural China.

Using the 2006 China Agricultural Census (CAC), we examine whether the introduction of the New Cooperative Medical System (NCMS) has affected child mortality, maternal mortality, and school enrollment of 6-16year olds. Our data cover 5.9 million people living in eight low-income rural counties, of which four adopted the NCMS by 2006 and four did not adopt it until 2007. Raw data suggest that enrolling in the NCMS is associated with better school enrollment and lower mortality of young children and pregnant women. However, using a difference-in-difference propensity score method, we find that most of the differences are driven by endogenous introduction and take-up of the NCMS, and our method overcomes classical propensity score matchings failure to address selection bias. While the NCMS does not affect child morality and maternal mortality, it does help improve the school enrollment of six-year-olds.

Income and Consumption Inequality in Urban China: 1992–2003

Using the nationally representative Urban Household Income and Expenditure Survey (UHIES) conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) of China, we document a steadily rising trend in income and consumption inequality during the period from 1992 to 2003 in urban China. Despite the rising urban inequality over time, the social welfare of urban residents unambiguously improved because every income group saw their income and consumption increase over this period (higher income groups experienced faster increases). Moreover, consumption inequality follows income inequality very closely. Labor income inequality accounts for about two‐thirds of total income inequality quite consistently over time. We find that only about one‐third of urban inequality can be attributed to observable individual choices and characteristics, of which education has increasing explanatory power, while regional differences become less important over time. We also find that restructuring of the SOE sector, urbanization, and globalization are important contributing factors to rising overall urban inequality and the within‐group inequality not accounted for by observable individual choices and characteristics.

Prenatal Sex Selection and Missing Girls in China: Evidence from the Diffusion of Diagnostic Ultrasound

How much of the increase in sex ratio (male to female) at birth since the early 1980s in China is attributed to increased prenatal sex selection? This question is addressed by exploiting the differential introduction of diagnostic ultrasound in the country during the 1980s, which significantly reduced the cost of prenatal sex selection. We find that the improved local access to ultrasound technology has resulted in a substantial increase in sex ratio at birth. Our estimates indicate that roughly 40 to 50 percent of the increase in sex imbalance at birth can be explained by local access to ultrasound examinations.

Gaming in Air Pollution Data? Lessons from China

Abstract Protecting the environment during economic growth is a challenge facing every country. This paper focuses on two regulatory measures that China has adopted to incentivize air quality improvement: publishing a daily air pollution index (API) for major cities since 2000 and linking the API to performance evaluations of local governments. In particular, China defines a day with an API at or below 100 as a blue sky day. Starting in 2003, a city with at least 80% blue sky days in a calendar year (among other criteria) qualified for the “national environmental protection model city” award. This cutoff was increased to 85% in 2007.Using officially reported API data from 37 large cities during 2000-2009, we find a significant discontinuity at the threshold of 100 and this discontinuity is of a greater magnitude after 2003. Moreover, we find that the model cities were less likely to report API right above 100 when they were close to the targeted blue sky days in the fourth quarter of the year when or before they won the model city award. That being said, we also find significant correlation of API with two alternative measures of air pollution – namely visibility as reported by the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) and Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD), corrected for meteorological conditions, from NASA satellites. The discontinuity around 100 suggests that count of blue sky days could have been subject to data manipulation; nevertheless, API does contain useful information about air pollution.

Curriculum and Ideology

We study the causal effect of school curricula on students’ political attitudes, exploiting a major textbook reform in China between 2004 and 2010. The sharp, staggered introduction of the new curriculum across provinces allows us to identify its causal effects. We examine government documents articulating desired consequences of the reform and identify changes in textbooks reflecting these aims. A survey we conducted reveals that the reform was often successful in shaping attitudes, while evidence on behavior is mixed. Studying the new curriculum led to more positive views of China’s governance, changed views on democracy, and increased skepticism toward free markets.

Girl adoption in China—A less-known side of son preference

In 1987, 4 per cent of girls were adopted within China. Why? Unlike infanticide, abandonment rids parents of daughters while preserving the supply of potential brides. In fact, an erstwhile tradition common in Fujian and Jiangxi provinces had parents of sons adopting an infant girl to serve as a future daughter-in-law and household help. Analysing a nationally representative 1992 survey of children, we found that: (1) girl adoptions were concentrated in the above-mentioned provinces; (2) girls were predominantly adopted by families with sons; (3) adopted girls faced substantial disadvantage as measured by school attendance at ages 8–13. In the 1990s, as the sex ratio at birth climbed, were girls aborted rather than abandoned? Observing that in the 2000 census too many girls appear in families with older sons, we estimated that at least 1/25 girls were abandoned in the 1990s, a proportion that in Fujian and Jiangxi may have peaked at 1/10 in 1994.

The Long-Term Effects of Protestant Activities in China

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Combining county-level data on Protestant presence in 1920 and socioeconomic indicators in 2000, we find that the spread of Protestantism has generated significant positive effects in long-term economic growth, educational development, and health care outcomes. To better understand whether the relationship is causal, we exploit the fact that missionaries purposefully undertook disaster relief work to gain the trust of the local people. Thus, we use the frequency of historical disasters as an instrument for Protestant distribution. Our IV results confirm and enhance our OLS results. When we further investigate the transmission channels over the long historical period between 1920 and 2000, we find that although improvements in education and health care outcomes account for a sizable portion of the total effects of missionaries’ past activities on today’s economic outcomes, Protestant activities may have also contributed to long-term economic growth through other channels, such as through transformed social values. If so, then a significant amount of China’s growth since 1978 is the result not just of sudden institutional changes but of human capital and social values acquired over a longer historical period.

Salience of History and the Preference for Redistribution

Citizens’ preference for redistribution determines many key political economy outcomes. In this project, we aim to understand how do ancestors’ redistributive experiences affect the descendants’ preference for redistribution. We conduct a survey experiment under the historical backdrop of the wealth equalization movements during the Communist Revolution in China (1947-1956). We remind a random subset of respondents of these movements that their ancestors went through. We find that on average, making the historical experiences salient turns the respondents significantly and persistently more favorable towards government redistribution. We show that the treatment effect is not driven by changes in apolitical preferences, beliefs of current inequality, or knowledge of the movements. Salience in history influences the mental framework when respondents think of redistribution: respondents are reminded of the specific family experiences during past redistribution, and they are triggered to project similar redistribution in the future.