Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) we estimated the effect of childhood vaccination on later-life schooling and cognitive abilities of elderly Chinese. We found that being vaccinated in childhood increases schooling by one year and improves numeracy and episodic memory scores by 6 percent on average. These encouraging results confirm the powerful and long-lasting benefits of childhood vaccination.
China is aiming to become a technological innovation powerhouse by 2050, with Premier Li Keqiang recently announcing an increase in R&D investments by 7% for the next five years. But greater R&D investment is no guarantee of success. This column examines the effects of R&D investments by Chinese firms on aggregate productivity and growth.
China implemented a pioneering policy in 2011, the Ecological Compensation Initiative (ECI), which establishes side payments between upstream and downstream provinces in the Xin’an River Basin.
Capital controls are common in many developing countries. With capital controls, the standard financial market transactions needed for currency carry trade are hard to implement. Yet, as long as there is a big difference between domestic and foreign interest rates, the incentive to engage in currency carry trade is present.
We document gender differences in reactions to failure in the National College Entrance Exam, an important, high-stakes competition that solely determines college admission outcomes for almost all teenagers in China. Using unique administrative data in Ningxia Province and a regression-discontinuity design, we find that students who score just below the tier-2 university cutoff have an eight-percentage-point higher probability of retaking...