Between 2002 and 2024, Mongolia's income inequality decreased substantially. Structural economic shifts, labor market changes, and evolving income composition drive this reduction. Using income source decomposition on household survey data, this study finds that the reduced shares of self-employment and agricultural income were the main equalizing channel. In contrast, rising wage shares exerted upward pressure on inequality despite declining wage concentration. The expansion of employment in the mining, trade, and finance sectors, along with broad coverage of social welfare programs, especially child benefits, played a significant role. Pandemic-era transfers intensified the impact of social transfers. However, regional disparities and vulnerability of herder households persist. The results highlight the importance of targeted labor market policies, improved social transfer design, and resilience measures for rural livelihoods in resource-dependent developing economies.
We examine the effect of maternal education on preventive health behavior using data from Cambodia. Given concerns about the endogeneity of education, we employ an instrumental variable (IV) strategy that exploits the variation in the average years of maternal education across provinces and between cohorts that entered primary school following the 1993 UNICEF Education Plan and older cohorts, as the 1993 reform substantially altered the educational environment following decades of political conflict. The IV estimates indicate that higher maternal education has positive effects on preventive health behavior, including receiving adequate antenatal care, having skilled birth attendants, and not smoking. These results further suggest that maternal information-gathering ability and bargaining power may serve as mechanisms linking maternal education to preventive health behavior.
This paper examines the impact of services trade liberalization on the productivity of manufacturing firms in China. Using a shift-share approach, we construct a city-level measure of services trade restrictiveness to capture regional variation in exposure to liberalization. To address potential endogeneity, we employ an instrumental variable strategy that draws on services trade policy trends in other countries. Our empirical findings show that liberalization significantly enhances manufacturing firm productivity, with stronger effects in industries that rely more heavily on service inputs. Mechanism analysis suggests that liberalization improves firms' access to more efficient service providers, resulting in cost savings and productivity gains. Sectoral heterogeneity analysis reveals that these effects are especially pronounced when trade barriers are reduced in courier and transport services, financial services, professional services, and telecommunications and computer services. Among various policy dimensions, restrictions on labor mobility, discriminatory regulations, and barriers to competition emerge as the most influential. These findings offer valuable policy insights into the economic benefits of services liberalization and underscore the importance of such reforms in supporting industrial upgrading in emerging markets.
Preventing school bullying is a critical issue in the global educational landscape. This paper focuses on the influence of peer violent behavior on the likelihood of junior high school students becoming school bullies. Utilizing data from the 2014 to 2015 China Education Panel Survey, we employ Ordinary Least Squares estimation to examine the relationship between peer violence and individual bullying behavior and find that the probability of students bullying classmates significantly rises by 9.0% when their close friends are involved in violent acts. This baseline conclusion remains robust even after addressing endogeneity concerns using the Oster test and propensity score matching (PSM) method. This relationship appears to be mediated by several mechanisms, including behavioral imitation, emotional contagion, and erosion of moral inhibitions. In addition, the heterogeneity analysis reveals that the positive correlation between peer violence and bullying is particularly pronounced among male class teachers. Finally, the study also uncovers that peer violence can lead to a range of negative consequences, including increased incidences of student truancy, academic dishonesty, negative academic achievement, and strained familial relationships. Our findings carry significant implications for developing strategies to mitigate and prevent school bullying.
