Essays on political economy of development
- Autores: Yining Geng
- Directores de la Tesis: Maria Petrova (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( España ) en 2019
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Gerard Padró Miquel (presid.), Giacomo Ponzetto (secret.), Mónica Martínez Bravo (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Economía, Finanzas y Empresa por la Universidad Pompeu Fabra
- Materias:
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- Resumen
Development economics has been defined as the study of the economic structure and behavior of less developed countries (W.A. Lewis,1984). It generally focuses on topics on the reduction of poverty, improvements in the well-being of the population, and an increase in productivity. China, as one of the largest developing countries in the world, provides an ideal environment to study these topics. In spite of China’s fast growth in the past 40 years, socioeconomic problems arise and accompany. Studying the socioeconomic problems in the context of China is important not only for improving our understanding of China itself but also for drawing policy implications for developing countries as a whole.
In this thesis, I undertake the theoretical and empirical investigation of several topics of the development economics of China. In summary, in the first chapter, I focus on gender inequality and study how family planning policy can alleviate it; In the second chapter, I study intergenerational mobility in China and its determinants; The third chapter is set in a more modern setting, in which I study Chinese exporting firms’ barriers to participating in global value chains.
In the first chapter, I develop a theoretical framework to study the impact of family planning policies on gender-specific outcomes. Empirically, I use China’s Family Planning Policy (FPP) since 1971 to understand how a reduction in the number of children in a family can generate gender-specific outcomes. I mainly use diff-in-diff strategy to compare the education outcomes between boys and girls before and after the FPP. I find that while post-FPP-born children generally stay in school longer, this effect is particularly stronger for girls. This finding is robust to (1) using diff-in-diff-in-diff strategy by incorporating another dimension of variations — different fertility constraints imposed by the FPP on the ethnic majority Han and the minorities; (2) using a different measure of education outcomes — the probability of continuing education beyond the compulsory education period. In addition, I document that FPP also has an impact on changing women’s preference for family size and gender attitudes. Post-FPP-born women show a more pronounced change in gender attitudes and exhibit less son preference than men.
In the second chapter, I study the questions about what drives mobility and why do some areas generate higher rates of mobility than others? First, using individual data from censuses and surveys, I characterize the features of intergenerational mobility in China based on education and occupation for cohorts from 1949 to 1977. Second, guided by a simple model built on aspiration-based poverty theory, I empirically investigate how intergeneration-transmitted aspirations can contribute to the emergence and persistence of social mobility. I report several findings. First, I show that there are substantial geographic variations in education- and occupation-based intergeneration mobility across prefectures in China. Second, I empirically examine the role of aspiration in explaining contemporary social mobility. Using the plausibly exogenous success rate for the bureaucrat selection examination (Keju) in ancient China as a proxy for historical aspirations and taking advantage of the extensive changes in prefecture boundaries since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, I find that aspirations increase upward mobility, and the effect happens to individuals in the low-to-middle quintiles in the education distribution. Third, using the victims of the anti-intellectual movement (the Cultural Revolution) in the 1970s as a proxy for the perceived drop in return to education, I show that return to education had a positive impact on determining upward mobility. Finally, I find that in environments with more aspiration, individuals’ upward mobility is more responsive to changes in the perceived return to education.
In the third chapter, My coauthor and I focus on buyers and suppliers search and contracting problem. We focus on intermediate goods and we quantify the two trade costs separately by exploiting suppliers’ different degrees of online exposure. We build a theoretical model of buyers and suppliers with information frictions. We test the model predictions using both reduced-form analysis and structural estimation. Empirically, we find that using trade platform significantly improve the suppliers’ trade performance by mitigating the contracting problem. The reduced-form results show that suppliers that use Alibaba.com have higher trade values, trade with a wider range of countries and perform more transactions.
