Our study analyses 6 million civil judgments in China from 2014 to 2018, documenting gender disparities that disfavour female litigants. We investigate the impact of an open justice reform that mandated courts to broadcast legal proceedings live on a centralized online platform. By exploiting variations in its implementation across courts and over time and employing both difference-in-differences and Bartik IV approaches, we find that gender disparities in chances of winning decrease as broadcast intensity increases. Analysis of the textual content of judicial decisions provides further evidence that these changes in judicial outcomes stem from altered judge behaviours (i.e. attention and effort) under enhanced judicial transparency. Our results demonstrate how information technology shapes judges’ conduct, underscoring its broader potential to improve accountability in public institutions.

Media censorship is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. We conduct a field experiment in China to measure the effects of providing citizens with access to an uncensored internet. We track subjects’ media consumption, beliefs regarding the media, economic beliefs, political attitudes, and behaviors over 18 months. We find four main results: (i) free access alone does not induce subjects to acquire politically sensitive information; (ii) temporary encouragement leads to a persistent increase in acquisition, indicating that demand is not permanently low; (iii) acquisition brings broad, substantial, and persistent changes to knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and intended behaviors; and (iv) social transmission of information is statistically significant but small in magnitude. We calibrate a simple model to show that the combination of low demand for uncensored information and the moderate social transmission means China’s censorship apparatus may remain robust to a large number of citizens receiving access to an uncensored internet.

We report results from a randomized natural field experiment conducted in a restaurant dining setting to distinguish the observational learning effect from the saliency effect. We find that, when customers are given ranking information of the five most popular dishes, the demand for those dishes increases by 13 to 20 percent. We do not find a significant saliency effect. We also find modest evidence that the observational learning effects are stronger among infrequent customers, and that dining satisfaction is increased when customers are presented with the information of the top five dishes, but not when presented with only names of some sample dishes.

We report results from a large, randomized field to study how access to formal microinsurance affects production and economic development. We induce exogenous variation in insurance coverage at the village level by randomly assigning performance incentives to the village animal husbandry worker who is responsible for signing farmers up for the insurance. We find that promoting greater adoption of insurance significantly increases farmers' sow production, and this effect seems to persist in the longer run; moreover, the increase in sow production in response to the sow insurance does not seem to be the result of the substitution of other livestock.

This paper assesses the role of heating entitlements in generating stark air quality differences across China. During the 1950-1980 central planning period, the Chinese government established free winter heating of homes and offices as a basic right via the provision of free coal fuel for boilers. The combustion of coal in boilers is associated with the release of air pollutants, especially total suspended particulates (TSP). Due to budgetary limitations, however, this heating entitlement was only extended to areas to the north of the line formed by the Huai River and Qinling Mountains in central China. We find this procrustean policy led to dramatically higher TSP levels in the north; the difference is roughly 5-8 times current TSP concentrations in the US. This result holds both in a cross-sectional regression discontinuity-style estimation approach and in a panel data setting that compares the marginal effect of winter temperature on TSP in northern and southern China. In contrast, we fail to find evidence that the heating policy has a meaningful impact on sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxide (NOx) concentrations.

We study the causal effect of school curricula on students? political attitudes, exploiting a major textbook reform in China between 2004 and 2010. The sharp, staggered introduction of the new curriculum across provinces allows us to identify its causal effects. We examine government documents articulating desired consequences of the reform and identify changes in textbooks reflecting these aims. A survey we conducted reveals that the reform was often successful in shaping attitudes, while evidence on behavior is mixed. Studying the new curriculum led to more positive views of China?s governance, changed views on democracy, and increased skepticism toward free markets.