This paper studies the endogenous formation of intersibling altruism. The theory suggests that parental incentive to foster children’s fraternal love is positively related to efficiency gains from more human capital investment in the more gifted child. The empirical analyses explore the plausibly exogenous within-twin difference in birth weight, a proxy for prenatal endowment. Consistent with the theory, the estimation results show that a larger difference in children’s birth weight leads to more intensive parenting practice to foster children’s fraternal love and that when such practice is more intensive, the heavier child obtains more investment relative to the other child.

This paper discovers that people born in the fourth quarter tend to have better lifecycle outcomes for 1930-1990 cohorts in China, and this birth quarter effect (BQE) is larger for females than males. To explain this finding, we hypothesize that seasonality in agricultural production, combined with son preference, leads to a gender gap in BQEs on child neonatal investment, and subsequently, on lifecycle outcomes. Exploiting seasonal agricultural production patterns and spatial variations in crop structures across provinces in China, we find individuals born in seasons with more abundant household resources for neonatal investment tend to have better lifecycle outcomes. In addition, we leverage weather shocks as a natural experiment for agricultural production and find that higher agricultural output in the previous year reduces the gender gap in BQEs in a given year of birth. Exploring China's economic reform in 1979 as a quasi-experiment, we further find that the effect of previous-year agricultural output is mitigated by economic development. Finally, we find a gender gap in BQEs on child neonatal investment, which is proxied by infant breastfeeding. Our findings demonstrate that economic development lessens the effect of poverty on gender inequality.

Using administrative data from a large and diverse emergency department (ED), we examine the impact of race concordance between patients and physicians on physician decision-making and patient health outcomes. We find that patient-physician race concordance increases consultation time and decreases the probability of inpatient admission and diagnostic testing. Subsequently, race-concordant patients have lower revisit rates after ED discharge. The effect of race concordance is largely driven by patients who had less serious illnesses and whose diseases had nonspecific symptoms or less clear causes. The results are best explained by the informational and communication mechanism.

We document that the source of funds for paying health insurance premiums has a dramatic impact on plan choices. We focus on the MediSave program in Singapore, a medical savings account that is used to pay out-of-pocket medical spending. Residents can also pay their health insurance premiums with cash or MediSave funds, but are subject to limits that vary by age and over time. By exploiting variations in those limits, we consistently find that when individuals are able to pay their health insurance premiums with MediSave funds, they are less price sensitive and more willing to enroll in more generous plans. We develop and estimate a mental accounting model which explains these patterns. We embed and reject alternative explanations such as hassle costs and liquidity constraints. We then extend this model and show that mental accounting can explain much, but not all, of the misweighting of premiums relative to out-of-pocket expenses in health insurance choice. We also find that allowing MediSave payment for both premiums and out-of-pocket expenses (e.g. putting them in the same mental account) enhances individual welfare and reduces adverse selection.

This study investigates the effects of unobserved earnings-related endowments on marital outcomes, focusing on potential gender differences. Using a less stringent, more plausible assumption that monozygotic twins share more similar endowments relative to dizygotic twins, we develop a novel identification strategy from the twins experiment. Using unique Chinese twins survey data, we find that men with genetic endowments related to higher earnings marry earlier and have younger, taller wives; such women marry later and have older husbands with higher education and income. Results cast doubt on the conventional assumption of independence between unobservables and observable marital attributes.

Since the introduction of the one-child policy in China in 1979, many more boys than girls have been born, foreshadowing a sizable bride shortage. What do young men unable to find wives do? This paper focuses on criminality, an asocial activity that has seen a marked rise since the mid-1990s. Exploiting province-year level variation, we find an elasticity of crime with respect to the sex ratio of 16- to 25-year-olds of 3.4, suggesting that male sex ratios can account for one-seventh of the rise in crime. We hypothesize that adverse marriage market conditions drive this association.

We analyze premarital investments in human capital and housing when individuals are unable to make binding commitments to share their labor income with a prospective spouse. Investments are distorted if there are gender differences in bargaining power over own labor income or marriage market imbalances. Distortions are magnified when ex ante bargaining power favors one sex (e.g., women in China) and ex post bargaining power favors the other (e.g., men in China), since parents of boys will increase housing investments in order to credibly commit to share more resources with the boy’s potential wife, possibly crowding out human capital investments.

We examine path dependency in physician decisions in an emergency department setting, and find that physicians’ treatment decisions for the current and previous patients are positively correlated. We show that the positive autocorrelation is higher when the current patient is of greater medical uncertainty or more similar to the previous patient in terms of observed characteristics and when the physician is less experienced or more fatigued. We then show that these patterns are highly consistent with the memory and attention model, whereby the physician’s current decision is anchored to her previous decision. The results from both reduced-form analyses and structural estimations provide further support for the importance of memory and attention in physician decision-making.

We develop a generalized theory of rationed fertility to analyze treatment effect heterogeneity in the child quantity-quality trade-off. An exogenous increase in fertility can be either desired or undesired. We derive a positive rationing income effect on child quality for desired fertility increases but a negative rationing income effect for undesired fertility increases. We propose an econometric framework to identify treatment effects of desired and undesired fertility increases and estimate a structural model to gauge the quantitative importance of the novel rationing income effect. Our study highlights the importance of distinguishing between desired and undesired changes when evaluating social programs.