"The long-term health effects of early-life malaria exposure: Evidence from Taiwan's malaria eradication in the 1950s,"
Cheng Chen , Shin-Yi Chou, Hsien-Ming Lien, and Jin-Tan Liu,
American Journal of Health Economics, 10:1, 30-67, Apr 2024.
This paper attempts to examine how malaria eradication in Taiwan during the 1950s, which successfully wiped out malaria within a short period, affected long-term health. Relying on three data sets covering the entire population of Taiwan, we construct diverse measures of health, including health-care utilization, functional abilities, chronic diseases, and catastrophic illnesses. Our results indicate that people who experienced larger reductions in early-life malaria exposure tend to have better health status as adults, especially women. Our results suggest a sizable cost saving from the eradication program that improves early-life environment and helps to avoid costly diseases at a later point.
"Family size, labor supply, and job prestige: Evidence from three decennial censuses in China,"
Cheng Chen , Ying-Min Kuo, and Wangyang Zhao, China Economic Review, 80: 101986, Aug 2023.
This study investigates the relationship between family size and parents’ labor market performance, measured by labor supply and occupational prestige scores, based on three census waves in 1990, 2000, and 2010. To address the endogeneity problem of family size, we use the indicator of twins at first birth as an instrumental variable. Our results suggest that in nuclear households, family size affects the labor market performance only of mothers, not of fathers, with the negative effects fading and gradually disappearing over time. More specifically, an increase in family size decreases female labor supply in the 1990 wave, leads to lower prestige scores among working mothers in the 2000 wave, and has no impact on labor supply or occupational prestige scores in the 2010 wave. Our subsample analysis indicates that the negative effects of family size are more severe for parents of households with all children under seven years old and for husbands or wives with lower education level than that of their partners. In addition, we find that the negative effects of family size on parental labor market outcomes are not observed in extended households, especially when no grandparents are aged 65 years or older.
"The effect of sibship size on educational attainment of the first born: Evidence from three decennial censuses of Taiwan,"
Cheng Chen , Sabrina Terrizzi, Shin-Yi Chou, and Hsien-Ming Lien, Empirical Economics, 61: 2173–2204, Aug 2021.
There exists extensive literature analyzing the effect of sibship size and a child’s educational attainment, termed the quantity-quality (QQ) trade-off. Studies using data from developed countries tend to find limited or nonexistent effects, while studies that use data from developing countries find a wide range of relationships. We study a possible explanation for these seemingly contradictory findings that the existence or non-existence of a QQ trade-off is correlated with the socioeconomic context within which the family resides. We use the census files comprised of the entire Taiwan population in the years 1980, 1990, and 2000, reflecting different levels of economic growth across time, coupled with an instrumental variable approach and more than 7000 village fixed effects. Our results indicate that sibship size has large and significant effects on educational outcomes, measured in terms of high school and college enrollments, for early birth cohorts, and the effects diminish for more recent birth cohorts. In addition, we find that areas in different developmental stages face different QQ trade-offs: areas with higher levels of development only have trade-offs among higher measures of quality.
"The relationship between family size and parents' labor supply and occupational prestige: Evidence from Taiwan and Mainland China,"
Cheng Chen , Wangyang Zhao, Shin-Yi Chou, and Hsien-Ming Lien, China Economic Review, 66: 101596, Apr 2021.
This paper studies the effect of family size on parents' labor supply and occupational prestige, using the censuses of both Taiwan and Mainland China. We rely on the exogenous increase in child quantity that results from having twins at the first birth. Our results indicate that an increase in family size has negative effects on the labor supply of mothers but not of fathers, in both Taiwan and Mainland China. In addition, we find that in Taiwan fathers tend to switch to occupations with lower prestige scores in response to an increase in family size. However, the negative effect of family size on occupational prestige is not observed in Mainland China, where the occupational mobility is low.
"The quantity of education and preference for sons: Evidence from Taiwan's compulsory education reform,"
Cheng Chen , Shin-Yi Chou, Lea Gimenez Duarte, and Jin-Tan Liu, China Economic Review, 59: 101369, Feb 2020.
This paper attempts to identify the causal effect of parental education on the male ratio at birth. To deal with the endogeneity of parental education, we exploit Taiwan's educational reform in 1968 making education compulsory up to the ninth grade. Based on a uniquely large and detailed administrative data set from Taiwan, our results show that the average education level of mothers is positively related to the male ratio at birth, both in the case of high-parity births and when mothers are at least 30 years old.
"The effect of the second child on the nutrition intakes and the anthropometric outcomes of the first child: Evidence from China's one-child policy,"
Cheng Chen , Shin-Yi Chou, Cheng Wang, and Wangyang Zhao, The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, 20(1): 20180340, Jan 2020.
This paper attempts to identify the causal effect of parental education on the male ratio at birth. To deal with the endogeneity of parental education, we exploit Taiwan's educational reform in 1968 making education compulsory up to the ninth grade. Based on a uniquely large and detailed administrative data set from Taiwan, our results show that the average education level of mothers is positively related to the male ratio at birth, both in the case of high-parity births and when mothers are at least 30 years old.
"The effect of household technology on weight and health outcomes among Chinese adults: Evidence from China's home appliances going to the countryside policy,"
Cheng Chen , Shin-Yi Chou and Robert J. Thornton, Journal of Human Capital, 9(3): 364–401, Sep 2015.
We utilize the variations in home appliance adoption generated by China’s Home Appliances Going to the Countryside policy to isolate the actual effects of household technology on weight and health outcomes. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental variable approaches, we find that the policy-induced technological change has increased the probability of being obese and the incidence of being sick or injured for rural women but has had no impact on rural men. Our results also indicate that household technology has increased female labor force participation but has decreased women’s overall levels of energy expenditure.
Working Papers
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"Pledge your faith in love? Estimating household risk- and benefit-sharing mechanisms using two natural experiments in China,"
with Wei Fu and Shin-Yi Chou, R&R at Economic Development and Cultural Change.
Much of the literature has studied sharing behavior within marriage in the face of either adverse or positive shocks; however, less attention has been paid to examining whether sharing behavior differs by the nature of the shock, which would require comparing two different shocks in the same cohort in the same cultural context. This paper examines the risk- or benefit-sharing behavior of couples by exploring two quasinatural experiments in China in the 1990s – the massive layoff reform and housing reform. The former elevated individuals’ layoff risk, leading to an exogenous adverse income shock, and the latter affected individuals’ property rights, generating a positive income expectation. With a particular focus on anthropometric measures, we find that when faced with adverse income shocks, couples do not noticeably share the risk, while when faced with positive income shocks, couples share the benefit. We also provide a conceptual framework to explain our findings.
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"Home ownership, family size, and college enrollment: Evidence from the housing cycle in the United States,"
with Ying-Min Kuo. (Jan 2024)
This paper utilizes the regional variation in house price changes over the real estate cycle to examine how the local housing shocks affect household’s resources distribution and their children’s education attainment in homeowner and renter households. Our results suggest that an increase in housing price growth significantly raises homeowner households’ education spending when there is a college-age child, and it levels up the firstborn children’s probability to attend a college even if the firstborns have more siblings. These results are driven mainly by homeowner households with less liquidity wealth. In contrast, the local housing shocks does not impact renter households’ resources distribution on their children’s education.
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"Culture, policy obedience, and virus spread: Evidence from the anti-COVID efforts in the United States,"
with Wei Fu, Ying-Min Kuo, and Yuanting Wu. (Dec 2022)
The government’s anti-COVID efforts in the United States have been seen to reduce unnecessary social mobility, curb the spread of the virus, and lower COVID-related mortality; however, these impacts vary by state. This paper aims to explain the heterogeneity in policy efficacy from an individualistic culture perspective, emphasizing rich social distancing and virus spread measures. We construct an individualistic culture measure based on the immigrants in each county in 1980 and the cultural context in the country of origin. By exploiting the variations in the cultural context across counties and the variations in the containment policies across states and over time, we first confirm that these policies lead to increased levels of social distancing and slow the virus spread. We also find that the individualistic culture weakens the policy effect on promoting social distancing, as reflected by fewer residents staying at home, more miles traveled per person, and more cross-border trips. Consequently, in a more individualistic cultural context, anti-COVID policies are less effective in curbing virus spread, as reflected by a higher virus reproduction rate and a higher polymerase chain reaction-positive rate. These results are reaffirmed when we alternatively measure the individualistic culture legacy from two specific historical immigrant influxes, i.e., the Westward Movement from 1790–1890 and the first major wave of Asian Immigration from 1850–1917.
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