Costly posturing: Relative status, ceremonies and early child development

Though social spending facilitates risk-pooling in the impoverished regions, too many resources devoted to social occasions may impose negative externalities and hinder efforts to alleviate poverty for households living close to subsistence. Conducting three waves census-type panel survey in rural western China with well-defined reference groups and detailed information on social occasions, gift exchanges, nutrients intake and health outcomes, we find that the squeeze effect originated from lavish ceremonies is associated with lower height-for-age zscore, higher probability of stunting and underweight in early child development. The lasting impact suggests that 'catch up' is limited. The squeeze is stronger for the fetal period and towards the lower tail of the distribution. Specifically, 39.2%, 33.3% and 64.6% of the sampled households suffer from net squeeze effect on stunting, underweight and lower height-for-age zscore, respectively. The squeeze effect is stronger for 1-3 age cohorts and between 2007 and 2009. We provide suggestive evidence on the intermediate pathways linking social events with poor health outcomes, such as share of food expenditure and basic nutrients intake. Our findings suggest more efficient policy interventions that target the households with pregnant women and of lower social rankings. --Relative Status,Squeeze Effect,Nutrients Intake,Stunting,Underweight,Gender

The Distribution of Income and Well-Being in Rural China: A Survey of Panel Data Sets, Studies and New Directions

This paper reviews the recent literature on inequality and income distribution in rural China utilizing panel datasets. We begin by briefly summarizing and comparing available panel datasets for rural China that can be employed to explore issues on inequality and income distribution, and major data issues that might act as obstacles to research and policy enforcement are then analyzed. The paper then reviews the trend and spatial decompositions of rural income inequality, its major determinants, and its relationship with household welfare. Dimensions other than income inequality, such as income mobility and income polarization, are categorized and reviewed respectively. A recently developed branch of literature on inequality and health is summarized. On the basis of the review, this paper concludes by identifying new research areas with existing panel data sets and a new panel dataset that could shape future research.Inequality；Income Distribution；Rural China；Panel Data

Peer Effect, Risk-Pooling and Status Seeking: Which Matters to Gift Spending Escalation in Rural China?

This paper is based on our ongoing joint work with Ravi Kanbur. Xi Chen is grateful to Ravi Kanbur for invaluable comments, guidance and encouragement. For comments and suggestions, please direct correspondence to Xi Chen at [email protected] Network, Peer Effect, Risk-pooling, Status Seeking, Gift-giving, Ceremony, Agricultural and Food Policy, Agricultural Finance, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, International Development, Public Economics, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods, Risk and Uncertainty, I32, J22, D13, D63,

Relative income, network interactions and social stigma

Blood donation with compensation is considered as a social stigma. However, more people in the reference group donate blood often leads to less moral concern and more followers. Therefore, the behavior is likely to be influenced through one's interactions with neighbors, friends and relatives. Meanwhile, relative income may affect the motives for blood donation through increasing mistrust and stress. The motives might be stronger for households of lower social rankings. Utilizing three-wave census-type panel data in 18 villages in rural western China, two identification strategies, instrumental variable and network-based identification, are implemented to estimate the effect of social interactions. Both community-specific and household-specific relative income measures are employed to test whether blood donation is more sensitive towards the less well-off in a society. We find strong evidence in support of the effects of social interactions, no matter whether instrumental variables or network centrality measures are adopted. Household-specific measures of relative income show more salient effects on blood donation than community-specific inequality. --Blood Donation,Social Interactions,Inequality,Relative Income,China

Optimizing Memory Efficiency for Convolution Kernels on Kepler GPUs

Convolution is a fundamental operation in many applications, such as computer vision, natural language processing, image processing, etc. Recent successes of convolutional neural networks in various deep learning applications put even higher demand on fast convolution. The high computation throughput and memory bandwidth of graphics processing units (GPUs) make GPUs a natural choice for accelerating convolution operations. However, maximally exploiting the available memory bandwidth of GPUs for convolution is a challenging task. This paper introduces a general model to address the mismatch between the memory bank width of GPUs and computation data width of threads. Based on this model, we develop two convolution kernels, one for the general case and the other for a special case with one input channel. By carefully optimizing memory access patterns and computation patterns, we design a communication-optimized kernel for the special case and a communication-reduced kernel for the general case. Experimental data based on implementations on Kepler GPUs show that our kernels achieve 5.16X and 35.5% average performance improvement over the latest cuDNN library, for the special case and the general case, respectively

Peer effects, risk pooling, and status seeking: What explains gift spending escalation in rural China?

It has been widely documented that the poor spend a significant proportion of their income on gifts even at the expense of basic consumption. We test three competing explanations of this phenomenon—peer effect, status concern, and risk pooling—based on a census-type primary household survey in three natural villages in rural China and on detailed household records of gifts received on major occasions. We show that gift-giving behavior is largely influenced by peers in reference groups. Status concern is another key motive for keeping up with the Joneses in extending gifts. In particular, poor families with sons spend more on gift giving in proportion to their income than their rich counterparts, in response to the tightening marriage market. In contrast, risk pooling does not seem to be a key driver of the observed gift-giving patterns. However, we show that large windfall income triggers the escalation of competitive gift-giving behavior.ceremony, gift giving, Peer effect, risk pooling, social network, status seeking,