CORRUPTION AND LEFT-WING BELIEFS IN A POST-SOCIALIST TRANSITION ECONOMY: EVIDENCE FROM CHINA'S ???HARMONIOUS SOCIETY???

We find that perceptions of corruption are positively correlated with left-wing beliefs across 32 Chinese cities, controlling for income, personal characteristics and ideology.beliefs, corruption, fairness, political legitimacy.

FIRM SIZE AND WAGES IN CHINA

While most studies find evidence of a wage-firm size premium, we find that larger firms in China actually pay lower wages. We also find that the most plausible explanation for this result is that larger firms in China employ a higher ratio of blue-collar workers.wages, firm size, China.

AN EXAMINATION OF THE IMPACT OF INDIA'S PERFORMANCE IN ONE-DAY CRICKET INTERNATIONALS ON THE INDIAN STOCK MARKET

This study examines the impact of the Indian cricket team's performance in one day international cricket matches on returns on the Indian stock market. The main conclusion of the study is that there exists an asymmetric relationship between the performance of the Indian cricket team and stock returns on the Indian stock market. While a win by the Indian cricket team has no statistically significant upward impact on stock market returns, a loss generates a significant downward movement in the stock market. When Sachin Tendulker, India's most popular cricketer, plays the size of the downward movement in returns is larger.Cricket, India, Stock Market, Stochastic Dominance, Investor Psychology.

Children and Parental Health: Evidence from China

In most developing countries children provide some form of insurance against risks when parents are old, which, in turn, justifies parental preference to have more children. In this paper, we examine the causal effect of number of children on several measures of health status of elderly parents using newly available China Health and Retirement Survey data. Because number of children in a family is not exogenously determined, we use a natural experiment (variations in China’s one child policy) and preferences for a son to account for exogenous variation in family size. We show that both variation in the one-child policy and having a first born child who is a daughter significantly increase the family size. Overall, our results suggest that having more children has a negative effect on self-reported parental health, but generally no effect on other measures of health. We find no difference between the effect of number of children on maternal and paternal health. We find some evidence that having an adult daughter living at home, or in close geographical proximity, has a positive effect on parental health. The results also suggest that upstream financial transfers have a positive effect on parental health.Children, Parental Health, China, One-child policy, Sex preference

TWO NEW EXPONENTIAL FAMILIES OF LORENZ CURVES

We present two new Lorenz curve families by using the basic model proposed by Sarabia, Castillo and Slottje (1999). We present estimations which show that the models in our new families are very efficient when applied to data on income distribution for a range of countries from Shorrocks (1983).Lorenz curve

IS THE OUTPUT-CAPITAL RATIO CONSTANT IN THE VERY LONG RUN?

A key prediction of standard models of economic growth is that the output-capital ratio is constant along the economy's balanced growth path. Using data for 16 OECD countries over 135 years we examine whether the output-capital ratio reverts to a constant in the long run using univariate and panel stationarity tests with structural breaks. Univariate unit root tests with one and two breaks in the mean suggest that, in most circumstances, the output-capital ratio fails to revert towards a mean. However, when we allow for up to five breaks in the mean we find that for 15 of the 16 countries, the output-capital ratio is stationary and that the output-capital ratio is also panel stationary.

Economic Returns to Schooling for China’s Korean Minority

This paper examines economic returns to schooling for China’s Korean minority in the urban labour market using ordinary least squares (OLS) and two-stage least squares. The OLS estimates of the returns to schooling are similar to findings from recent studies for the Chinese urban labour market. We use father’s education, mother’s education and spouse’s education to instrument for education. The two-stage least squares estimates are considerably higher than the OLS estimates for returns to schooling and slightly higher than existing two-stage least squares estimates of the returns to schooling for the Chinese urban labour market. The two stage least squares estimates of the returns to schooling for the Korean minority living in urban areas are high compared with the Asian average and world average. The economic returns to schooling reported in this study assists to explain why private demand for education among the Korean minority in China is strong and provides a justification for the Korean minority’s focus on educational attainment.

Unit Root Properties of Crude Oil Spot and Futures Prices

In this paper we examine whether WTI and Brent crude oil spot and futures prices (at one, three and six months to maturity) contain a unit root with one and two structural breaks, employing weekly data over the period 1991-2004. To realize this objective we employ Lagrange Multiplier (LM) unit root tests with one and two endogenous structural breaks proposed by Lee and Stazicich (2003, 2004). We find that each of the oil price series can be characterized as a random walk process and that the endogenous structural breaks are significant and meaningful in terms of events that have impacted on world oil markets.Crude oil prices, Unit root, Stationarity

Economic Returns to Speaking ‘Standard Mandarin’ Among Migrants in China’s Urban Labour Market

This paper uses data from the China Urban Labour Survey administered across 12 cities in 2005 to estimate the economic returns to speaking standard Mandarin among internal migrants in China’s urban labour market. The paper builds on studies that estimate the economic returns to international immigrants of being fluent in the major language of the destination country and studies that estimate the economic returns to proficiency in the national language amongst groups of people who speak a minority language. Importantly, we control for potential endogeneity bias in the estimates of the effect of language fluency on earnings. We find that for migrants as a whole, there are considerable economic returns to speaking standard Mandarin. We also find gender differences. While the coefficient on fluency in standard Mandarin is statistically significant and large for females, the coefficient on fluency is statistically insignificant for males. One possible explanation for this finding is that female migrant workers are engaged more in occupations which have greater contact with urban locals and hence the return to investment in language skills is higher. Another explanation is that female migrants are more likely to marry local men in the host city or have better verbal skills than men, meaning that they speak standard Mandarin with a less pronounced accent than men and, hence, suffer less labour market discrimination.Language, migrants, China

Inequality and Happiness in Urban China

This note examines the relationship between inequality and happiness in urban China using a large-scale survey administered in 31 cities in September 2002. We find that those who perceive income distribution to be unequal report lower levels of happiness, although results differ between high and low income individuals. We also examine the effect of reference group income on reported happiness and find that having wealthier city-mates lowers reported happiness, controlling for own income.Happiness