This article studies gender gap patterns in language and math during primary school periods in China, and investigates candidate theories to explain the observed patterns. Using an administrative test dataset, we find that girls on average outperform boys in language and have advantage in math in primary school. The gaps for language in all quantiles widen consistently over time. Female’s advantages in math in most quantiles, except the lowest, shrink over time. Using a survey on students in primary schools, we find that noncognitive skills can effectively reduce the gender gap in both Chinese and math. This effect is most pronounced for students in the bottom quantile group.

We examine the effect of media persuasion on educational choice, and find that Chi- nese newspaper articles on violence against doctors influence students’ decisions to study medicine at college. We match articles from over 1200 newspapers with an administrative dataset on college entrance enrollment from 2005 to 2011, and find that one additional article on anti-doctor violence leads to a 0.6% decrease in the number of students enrolled in medicine-related majors, and this effect is more pronounced for physician and nurs- ing majors. We perform a series of checks to ensure that the effect is driven by exposure to violence-related news rather than violent incidents themselves. An instrumental vari- able approach that exploits plausibly exogenous variations in local political turnover and province-wide violent incidents helps establish causality. Moreover, we find that exposure to violence-related news reduces the quality of medical students, measured by their rank in the college entrance examination. Our findings suggest that media coverage can change individuals’ perception of career risks and affect their educational choices.

This paper provides empirical evidence on how China’s transition from the Boston mechanism to the Chinese parallel mechanism (a simplified version of the Deferred Acceptance mechanism), along with changes to the information available to students on their entrance exam performance when they submit their college preferences, affect the academic match between colleges and students. Using data on students admitted to Chinese colleges from 2005 to 2011, we characterize the general patterns of mismatch between colleges and students based on students’ scores on China’s National College Entrance Exam and find evidence of substantial overmatch and undermatch. Results from a generalized difference-in-differences model indicate that switching from the Boston mechanism to the Chinese parallel mechanism lowered the probability of mismatch by approximately 6%. Allowing students to submit their college preferences after learning their exam scores rather than before the exam reduced the probability of mismatch by 18%.

Substituting generic for brand name drugs whenever possible has been proposed to control prescription drug expenditure growth in the United States. This work investigates two types of state laws that regulate the procedures under which pharmacists substitute bioequivalent generic versions of brand name drugs. Mandatory substitution laws require pharmacists to use the generic as a default, and presumed consent laws allow them to assume that the patient agrees to the substitution. Both situations can be overruled by the patient. Using plausibly exogenous changes in states’ laws, we use differencein‐ differences and a discrete choice model to show that although the mandatory switching laws have little effect, the presumed consent laws reduce consumers’ probability of purchasing brand name drugs by 3.2% points. The differential effectiveness of the laws is likely caused by pharmacists’ profit motives. These results offer important implications for policies that seek to reduce drug expenditures by incentivizing the use of generic drugs.

This paper examines households’ extrapolative behaviors and developers’ strategic responses in China’s land and housing markets. Our stylized model predicts that when households extrapolate in the housing market, developers with nearby land holdings strategically bid higher, anticipating rising housing prices to boost the value of their existing stock. Using the exogenous timing of land auctions, we show that higher land premiums increase transaction prices and volumes of nearby houses. Furthermore, developers with nearby land stocks consistently pay higher premiums in the land auctions. We exploit a policy reform and implement various tests to support the hypothesis that developers strategically influence homebuyers’ expectations.

本文整合国家自然科学基金项目申请、评审与科研产出的微观数据，构建个体层面面板数据集，系统评估了科学基金资助对科研产出的因果效应。在方法论上，本文创新性地运用机器学习技术从非结构化的同行评审文本中提取特征信息，据此构建工具变量，有效克服了科研资助因非随机分配带来的内生性难题。研究发现：科学基金资助短期内显著提升了科研产出数量，但其长期效应可能被传统方法高估；资助的促进作用在产出质量上呈现结构性非均衡特征，论文增长主要集中于中低影响力期刊，对高水平期刊论文及发明专利等成果的推动力有限；机制分析揭示了资助通过缓解资本约束与拓展合作网络的双重路径发挥作用。上述发现为国家自然科学基金当前推行的提升项目申请质量，及强化资助源头创新的改革导向提供了有力的证据支持。

We conduct a laboratory school-choice experiment in which admission cut-offs arise endoge- nously, testing correlation neglect in school choice settings. Relative to Rees-Jones et al. (2024) which fixes thresholds ex ante, we show that correlation neglect persists in complex school-choice environments. We evaluate three debiasing tools. First, we provide a reminder highlighting that admission outcomes are correlated. Second, we offer an algorithmic aid that supplies personal- ized admission probabilities, reducing the burden of Bayesian updating. Third, we implement an iterative deferred-acceptance mechanism that reveals rejection outcomes sequentially, sim- plifying contingent reasoning. The reminder has no effect. Providing personalized probabilities substantially reduces aggressive applications, but the reduction does not vary with the severity of correlation neglect. In contrast, the iterative mechanism directly attenuates correlation-neglect errors, especially when correlated risks are large. These findings inform the ongoing global reform of centralized admissions systems and suggest that both informational and structural interventions deserve policy attention.

Poverty alleviation resettlement can reduce children’s long-run educational attainment when the destination offers abundant low-skilled manufacturing jobs. We study a 1994 program in China that relocated mountain villagers to peri-urban manufacturing communities, exploiting a quasi-experiment in which fiscal constraints limited relocation to 19 of 95 planned villages. Resettlement reduces senior high school attendance by 9 percentage points, college attendance by 8 percentage points, and years of schooling by one-third to one-half of a year. The mechanism is an opportunity cost channel: nearby factory jobs raised returns to early workforce entry relative to continued schooling. Resettled children also develop occupational skills tightly aligned with the destination’s manufacturing sector and are more likely to remain there as adults. These results contrast with the positive effects of relocations to lower-poverty neighborhoods and show that the impact of relocation on children hinges on the economic structure of the destination.

Leveraging a Poverty-Alleviation Relocation program in China, we examine how an opportunity shock in childhood shapes adults’ redistribution preferences. Using an unexpected capacity shortfall that left many pre-selected villages unrelocated, we identify the program’s impacts. Surveying individuals who were under 20 during relocation, we find that relocated children now exhibit significantly weaker support for redistributive policies. We investigate two potential channels: realized upward mobility and changes in mobility beliefs. Actual income gains among the targeted poor are modest and imprecisely estimated, but the program dramatically reshapes perceived mobility—relocated respondents roughly double their perceived probability that a poor child can reach the top of the income distribution, both unconditionally and when considering a child who works hard. Our findings suggest that opportunity-expanding programs can durably alter political attitudes primarily by reshaping the beliefs from which redistribution preferences emerge.

This paper examines college application behavior in a centralized matching mar- ket where students face demand uncertainty. Using a large field dataset from Chinese college admissions, we provide evidence of demand uncertainty by exploiting varia- tion in assignment mechanisms and other institutional features. We estimate a model of student decision-making with heterogeneous strategies and find that, relative to the benchmark with correct common priors, about 15% of students applied more pes- simistically and 24% more optimistically. The welfare effects of assignment mechanisms are also heterogeneous: optimistic and pessimistic students with high priority benefited from the transition from the Immediate Acceptance mechanism to the Chinese Parallel mechanism.