Research

With Minhee Chae and Xin Meng · Job Market Paper

China’s agricultural decollectivization, carried out between 1979 and 1984, replaced commune-based farming with household production and substantially raised productivity. It also dismantled the collective institutions that financed and organised rural public services. This paper examines the consequences of this institutional transformation for rural health.

Using a newly digitized county-by-year dataset that links mortality, disease incidence, and local health provision, and staggered difference-in-differences, we find that county mortality rates increased by roughly 1.6 percent following the reform, implying approximately 90,000 excess deaths annually nationwide. The mortality increase is concentrated in counties with the largest declines in village-doctor availability (the so-called “barefoot doctors”) and is accompanied by a higher probability of local infectious-disease surges after the reform.

These patterns are not explained by changes in government health expenditures, and accounting for differential pre-reform income trajectories modestly increases the estimated effect. Thus, rural 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

This paper studies how local governments translated China’s common fertility-control objective into heterogeneous policy instruments. 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 county-level measures of the types and intensity of rewards and penalties specified in local family-planning policies. This allows us to move beyond a single measure of One-Child Policy exposure and examine how local governments translated a common national objective into different policy designs, and how variation in those designs relates to fertility behavior. When these instruments are considered jointly, non-monetary penalties—primarily administrative sanctions—are most strongly associated with fertility decline, with a significantly stronger relationship in urban than in rural areas.

With Xin Meng and Sen Xue

Building on the pioneering work of Almond et al. (2019), we revisit the relationship between the Household Responsibility System, the One-Child Policy, and sex selection in rural China. Using an expanded county sample, we reconstruct local exposure to both reforms, distinguish pilot and broader adoption stages, and apply recent robust staggered difference-in-differences methods. The new measures reveal a different pattern: the effects are concentrated among households exposed to both policies. The findings suggest that economic resources and fertility constraints interacted to intensify households’ sex-selective behavior. We further find evidence that the pilot and broader implementation phases of each reform had differential impacts on fertility outcomes, reflecting evolving mechanisms as the two policies progressed.

Presented at: RSE PhD Workshop · RSE Seminar

With Lei Zhou, Ninghua Sun, and Jiawei Zhang · Inquiry into Economic Issues, 2021(04): 145–156 (in Chinese)

With Lei Zhou, Ninghua Sun, and Yefeng Miao · Resources and Environment in the Yangtze Basin, 2021(04): 782–795 (in Chinese)