Speaker: Fan Yi (National University of Singapore)
Inviter: Gu Xin (Southeast University)
Time: 2:00 - 3:30 pm
Date: September 21st, 2022
Tencent Meeting ID: 971-788-655
About Speaker:
Fan Yi, Assistant Professor, Department of Real Estate, Business School of National University of Singapore; PhD, London School of Economics and Political Science. His main research areas are urban economics and labor economics. Her research topics include intergenerational mobility and distributive justice, economic analysis of the impact of migration on the real estate market, and economic analysis of environmental pollution (especially noise pollution). She has chaired/co-chaired four Tier 1/Tier 2 academic research grants from the Singapore Ministry of Education, and has published a number of papers in leading international publications including American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Regional Science, and China Economic Review, etc. She has received the NUS Humanities and Social Sciences Research Award and the NUS Business School Teaching Excellence Award. She is currently a guest editor of Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews. Her views and researches have been featured in The Economist, VoxChina, Straits Times, Business Times and many other international media.
Abstract:
Using China's one-child policy (OCP), one of the most extreme forms of birth control in recorded history as a quasi-natural experiment, we show that differential fertility between rich and poor families amplifies intergenerational transmission of inequality in the country. Rural/poorer Chinese families, whose fertility choices are less constrained by the OCP than those of urban/richer ones, have more children but invest less in children's human capital under child's quality-quantity trade-off. Income inequality persists and increases across generations. Children born to the rich become richer, while children of the poor stay poor. The OCP accounts for a significant part of the declining intergenerational income mobility in China over the past decades. Our results shed light on public policies to improve economic opportunity of the next generation, especially for children born to disadvantaged families, from a demographic perspective.
Translated by: Luo Jiaoying
Reviewed by: Wang Xuanyu
