Shulei Zhang

With Minhee Chae and Xin Meng · Job Market Paper

China’s agricultural decollectivization raised productivity but weakened the collective institutions supporting rural primary care. Using newly digitized county-level data and staggered difference-in-differences, we find that mortality increased by about 1.6 percent after reform, equivalent to roughly 90,000 excess deaths annually. Effects are concentrated where village-doctor availability declined most. The results highlight that China’s early market-oriented reforms carried substantial and long-lasting health costs by weakening local primary-care capacity.

Presented at: LEW 2026 · ACE 2026 · CCER Summer Institute 2026 · AEDC 2026 · ADEW 2026

With Xin Meng and Sen Xue

We study how local governments translated China’s nationwide fertility-control objective into different combinations of rewards and penalties. Drawing on roughly 4,000 county gazetteers and more than 30,000 local family-planning policy records, we use large-language-model (LLM)-assisted analysis to construct new measures of the types and intensity of local policy instruments. We find that non-monetary penalties—primarily administrative sanctions—are most strongly associated with fertility decline, with a significantly larger relationship in urban than in rural areas.

With Xin Meng and Sen Xue

Building on Almond et al. (2019), this paper revisits how two contemporaneous reforms—the Household Responsibility System and the One-Child Policy—affected sex-selection behavior in rural China. We expand the county-level policy data, refine the measurement of local reform timing, and apply recent robust staggered difference-in-differences methods. The paper reassesses the relative and combined roles of economic reform and fertility policy in household sex-selection decisions.

Presented at: RSE PhD Workshop · RSE Seminar