Essays in historical and contemporary Chinese economy
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation is a collection of three essays on historical political institutions and contemporary economic issues in China. In the first chapter, titled "State Formation and Bureaucratization: Evidence from Pre-Imperial China", I study the mechanisms of state-building in pre-imperial China. I develop an incomplete contract model of land ownership and military conflict, which produces three predictions. First, external military threat dampens state-building as the ruler needs to incentivize his agent to defend against invasion by giving out ownership to land. Second, military attacks are conducive to state-building as centralized states are more efficient at offense. Third, a decrease in the bargaining position of administrators also facilitates state-building. Empirical tests and historical examples are consistent with model predictions. In the second chapter, titled "Media Attention and Choice of Major: Evidence from Anti-Doctor Violence in China", we study the effect of media persuasion in the context of educational choices. We exploit plausibly exogenous variations in Chinese newspaper articles on anti-doctor violence to identify how media reports affect students' decision to study medicine in college. We collect articles from over 1,200 newspapers and match them with an administrative dataset containing the universe of students enrolled in Chinese colleges from 2005 to 2011. We find that one additional article on violence against doctors leads to a 0.5 percent decrease in the number of students choosing medicine majors, especially majors that train physicians and nurses. Students attending elite colleges and with above-median test scores are more responsive to media attention. Consequently, articles on violence reduce the quality of medical students, measured by their rank in the college entrance examination. In the third chapter, titled "Marital Preferences and Housing Prices in China: Evidence from Online Dating", we estimate the effects of China's surging house prices on individuals' marital preferences and equilibrium assortative matching patterns. Using data from China's largest dating website, we estimate mate preferences based on users' decision to reply to a first-time message from a contact. We find that (1) site users, in particular women, have strong preferences for home-ownership, and increases in housing prices are associated with higher reply rate by women; (2) compared to non-homeowners, homeowners have stronger preferences for home-ownership; (3) home-ownership increases users' competitiveness and this effect becomes more pronounced for men when as housing prices increase; (4) there is weak evidence on the impact of housing prices on equilibrium assortative matching patterns.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Chen, Yuxin |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Greif, Avner, 1955- |
| Thesis advisor | Greif, Avner, 1955- |
| Thesis advisor | Acharya, Avidit |
| Thesis advisor | Fearon, James D |
| Thesis advisor | Jha, Saumitra |
| Degree committee member | Acharya, Avidit |
| Degree committee member | Fearon, James D |
| Degree committee member | Jha, Saumitra |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Yuxin Chen. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Yuxin Chen
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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