Hearing the Nation: Low-Barrier Information and Rural Education in Socialist China
Can the state integrate rural populations to whom its institutions remain illegible? I study the post-1952 rollout of wired broadcasting (youxian guangbo) across rural China — a state-funded loudspeaker network that required neither literacy nor household investment. Combining census microdata on ~388,000 rural children with the staggered rollout across ~1,175 counties, I find that exposed cohorts completed about 0.4 additional years of schooling, with effects concentrated at the junior high transition and nearly twice as large for children of illiterate household heads.
Falling Leaves Return to Their Roots: Policy-Driven Decomposition and the Role of Clan Networks of Chinese Housing Market
(with Andong Zhuge & Ping Zhang)
We develop a new approach to measuring housing bubbles in policy-driven markets and use it to study how clan networks and emigration history shape regional house-price dynamics in China.
Paths of Inheritance: Heterogeneity in Intergenerational Transmission of Housing Inequality: Evidence from Cohort Study in China (1935–2003)
(with Yuting Li)
We study how housing wealth is transmitted across generations in China, and how the channels of parental advantage shift across cohorts as the country moved from welfare allocation to a market economy.
