• ​"Building Schools Near the Front Doors of Poor Peasants: The Effects of a Massive Rural Education Expansion in Pre-reform China" (with Ziying Fan, Xiaomin Gu, and Li-An Zhou). 2022. [Download]

​Abstract: On the eve of its economic reforms, China achieved a much higher level of secondary education than other countries with a similar per capita income at the time. This study investigates the pre-reform formation of China's human capital by examining a massive rural education expansion program during the Cultural Revolution that increased the number of secondary schools more than tenfold. We examine newly compiled county-level data from local gazetteers and reach three important findings. First, we provide strong evidence that the program significantly improved rural children's educational attainment, and that teachers contributed more to this improvement than schools. Second, this rapid expansion was associated with a deterioration in education quality, but the presence of sufficient teachers helped mitigate the negative trade-off between quantity and quality. Third, by building a pool of middle-skilled labor years later, the education expansion program boosted local agricultural yields and increased the productivity of the township and village enterprises that emerged after the reform.

• ​​"The State of Mental Health Among the Elderly Chinese." (with Hanming Fang). 2020. Available as NBER Working Paper 26690. [Download]​

​​Abstract: China introduced its stringent family planning policies from the early 1970s, known as the "Later, Longer, Fewer" policies, and followed it with the One-Child Policy from 1979. The number of children born to Chinese parents significantly decreased from 5.7 in late 1960s to 2.5 in 1988. In Chen and Fang (2019), we show that family planning policies have drastically different effects on elderly parents' physical and mental well-beings. Whereas parents more exposed to the family planning policies consume more and enjoy slightly better physical health status, they report more severe depression symptoms. In this paper, we present a more complete picture of the difference in mental health among residents in rural and urban areas, between males and females, between different education groups, between those with one child and those with more than one children, and between widowed and non-widowed. We highlight the role of family support (from children and spouse) for the mental health status among the elderly Chinese.
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• ​​"Never Too Old to Save – Explaining the High Saving Rates of the Chinese Elderly." 2016. [Download]​

​​Abstract: The high saving rate of China has attracted global attention. Furthermore, the saving rates of the Chinese elderly are especially high. Understanding why the elderly in China save at high rates is important for two reasons: (1) it partially explains the high aggregate saving rate in China, and (2) the fact that the elderly save more than the middle-aged contradicts the predictions of the life-cycle model. In this paper, I present evidence that pension income is the primary explanation for the high saving rates of elderly Chinese households. I provide this evidence in three steps. First, I document three stylized facts that are consistent with this hypothesis: (1) saving rates are higher in years with higher pensions, (2) saving rates are higher for those with more generous pension plans, and (3) policy reforms that exogenously increase pensions also increase saving rates. However, a higher pension income on its own cannot explain the entire pattern because a household can simultaneously adjust its consumption. Therefore, in the second step, I demonstrate that concerns regarding future medical expenditures and bequest motives can explain why households do not increase their consumption commensurate with increases in pension income. Finally, I build and estimate a life-cycle model that accounts for all empirically observed features. Using this model, I nd that pension income, in the presence of medical expenditures and bequest motives, can explain the high saving rates of the elderly. Meanwhile, the economic growth rate in China can also a ect the saving rates of the elderly.