This study examines the causal impact of education on health literacy using a newly collected dataset from China that merges the 2020 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) with our self-designed Chinese Health Literacy Survey (CHLS). To address endogeneity concerns, we exploit the staggered implementation of the 1986 Compulsory Education Law as an instrumental variable. We find that one additional year of education increases health literacy by 17.3% of a standard deviation. This paper provides the first causal evidence linking education to directly measured health literacy, contributing to both the economics and public health literature.

Climate change, along with its associated extreme and abnormal temperature events, poses risks to human health. We examine the impact of temperatures on health insurance decisions using a proprietary dataset that links critical illness insurance records with long-term, daily meteorological data. We show that both heat and cold increase health insurance purchases. The effect of heat is driven by both heightened physical health risks and the salience of unexpected, abnormal heatwaves in health insurance decisions. However, the heat impact decays with prior experience to abnormal heat events. In contrast, we find no evidence that cold temperatures either increase physical health risks or trigger a salience effect. Risk preference changes and business cycles do not explain our findings. Air conditioning mitigates heat-induced insurance demand and centralized heating system mitigates cold-induced insurance demand. Males, the elderly, and outdoor workers are more sensitive to heat compared to females, the young, and indoor workers. This research uniquely quantifies the effects of abnormal temperatures on insurance purchases, highlighting the salience effect in insurance decision-making.

We develop a theoretical model where health literacy endogenously shapes healthcare spending decisions. The model predicts an inverted U-shaped relationship between literacy and spending, driven by two channels: the 'attention' effect, where increased health literacy enhances health awareness, and the 'productivity' effect, where health literacy improves health production efficiency. We empirically test these predictions based on an adult subsample of 2020 China Family Panel Studies, where individual-level health literacy is measured using a self-design questionnaire (the Chinese Health Literacy Survey) following internationally comparable and established instruments. To address the potential endogeneity, we apply Natural Language Processing on 2.16 million news articles to construct an instrumental variable for health literacy coverage.​ This instrument exploits province–month variation in news coverage of concepts related to understanding and navigating health information. Our quantitative analysis reveals that a 10

In a tournament-style education system, the high salience of ordinal academic rankings may amplify top performers’ influence as role models. This paper investigates how the gender of the top scorer in the class affects peer students’ outcomes in Chinese junior high schools. Leveraging a regression discontinuity design that exploits minimal score differences between the top-performing female and male students in a class, we find that having a female first-ranked student in a major exam significantly improves subsequent academic performance among girls, while no comparable effects are observed among boys. This gender-specific effect potentially operates through multiple channels: when a female student ranks first in the class, other girls exhibit higher levels of self-confidence, academic aspirations, study effort, and receive more parental support—effects that are not present among boys. Furthermore, the impact of top performer gender is particularly pronounced among academically lower-ranked girls and those from disadvantaged families. In sum, this paper provides the first causal evidence of the gender-differentiated external effect of ordinal ranks in educational settings.

Housing is a central household asset that shapes economic behavior. Using China Family Panel Survey data, we document a substitution effect between housing wealth and the value of sons as an alternative form of household security. A 10% increase in homeowners’ housing wealth raises the number of newborn daughters within the subsequent two years by 7.4% relative to the mean, with no corresponding effect on sons. Various mechanism tests indicate that households obtaining higher returns from the housing market become less sensitive to the gender difference in children’s expected returns. This insensitivity reduces the incentive for sex selection, leading to the birth of more girls. These findings offer a novel asset-market explanation for the decline in the sex ratio at birth in urban China and underscore the demographic consequences of wealth shocks.

We study the behavioural impact of the 2007 launch of the NHS website on older adults in England. Using eleven waves of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (2002–2022), we implement a cohort difference-in-differences design that scales post-2007 changes by a pre-period digital propensity index (P pre i ) estimated with cross-fitted gradient boosting. A one–standard deviation increase in P pre i is associated with increases of about 1.2 percentage points in GP contact (3 months), 3.0 percentage points in any screening, and 2.4 percentage points in exercise participation, alongside a small, imprecise decline in smoking. Event studies show flat pretrends and gradual post-2007 accumulation. Mechanism analyses indicate both a direct online channel (greater health-information use) and a GP-mediated channel (more routine checks), with larger effects among higher-education respondents. Results are robust to placebo policy dates, alternative constructions of P pre i , and fixed-effects variants. Curated public digital information can shift utilisation and selected behaviours in older populations, but complementary inclusion and accessibility policies are needed to avoid widening disparities. JEL Classification: I12, J14, I18, L86, D83

How do negative online ratings affect physician effort? Despite a substantial body of literature on financial incentives, empirical evidence regarding the impact of non-financial incentives on physicians remains limited. This study investigates the influence of negative online ratings on physician effort to improve physician-patient communication, using data from a prominent online healthcare platform. Our findings indicate that negative online ratings lead to a significant increase of 18.7% in the number of online consultations replied to by physicians, a 56.6% rise in the number of words typed, a 43.4% increase in the number of dialogues between physicians and patients, and a 30.1% increase in the number of replies. Additionally, physicians exhibit a more positive tone and greater textual coherence, as evidenced by a 0.37 percentage point increase in the probability of providing high-sentiment replies and a 1.23 percentage point rise in the probability of offering high-similarity responses, indicating a noticeable increase in physician effort to improve communication. The effect is more pronounced among physicians holding senior professional titles and those with higher ratings.

This paper investigates the effect of teachers’ schooling on student mental health in junior high schools in China. Based on the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) data, we exploit the random nature of class assignment for causal identification. The results show that students taught by head teachers with more years of schooling tend to have better mental health outcomes. This effect is shown to operate through several channels: more educated teachers tend to handle students’ mental health problems in a more scientific manner; they also have more effective communication with parents regarding their children's mental health, which potentially cultivates more responsive parenting styles and a closer parent-child relationship; better-educated head teachers also induce higher peer quality for their students. Among them, teachers’ specific know-how on student mental health problems and the role of parents are identified as primary mechanisms. Subsample analyses show the impact of teachers’ schooling on student mental health is larger for students with less maternal schooling, rural students, and male students. Our findings enrich the literature on the education-health gradient, and contribute to the understanding of the social welfare gains of enhancing schoolteachers’ human capital.

In recent years, rising divorce rates have drawn increasing attention to the issue of marital stability in China. Simultaneously, the development of a socialist market economy has highlighted the growing disparity in employment between the public and private sectors. Using data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2010 to 2020, this study applies the instrumental variable method to investigate the influence of parents' public sector employment on the marital stability of their offspring. The study shows that children of parents with public sector jobs experience a notable decrease in marital stability by approximately 22.8% points. This study further explores the potential mechanisms behind this phenomenon, including providing economic support for parents, shaping familial values, and impacting social relationships among offspring. The results demonstrate that public-private employment divisions affect marital stability across generations, offering a novel perspective on the factors contributing to its decline.

This paper investigates the role of teacher gender in shaping the parenting style within families of teenage students. Utilizing a representative sample of junior high school students in China and leveraging on the random assignment of students to classes, we discover that the presence of a female class head teacher prompts parents of girls to adopt a parenting style characterized by higher levels of demandingness and responsiveness and to have a closer emotional connection with their children. However, we do not detect significant effects of teacher gender among parents of boys. These gender-differentiated effects are potentially mediated through improved teacher-parent communication and shifts in parental beliefs concerning child education. Subsample analyses further highlight that the impact of teacher gender on parenting style for girls is more pronounced among students with lower levels of maternal education, those with siblings, and those in the seventh grade, in comparison with those in the ninth grade. Our findings enrich the research on the determinants of parenting style and gender disparities in intrahousehold investments and enhance our comprehension of the interplay of family and school inputs in students' human capital production in adolescent years.

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The rapid development of the digital economy has highlighted the crucial role of data in economic growth. This study investigates the impact of two types of innovation on long-term growth by incorporating data into a model of creative destruction and knowledge accumulation. Unlike traditional factors, data exhibit nonrivalry between the two research and development (R&D) sectors, thereby influencing the growth rate of economic outputs simultaneously without interference. Our findings reveal the existence of a balanced growth path (BGP) in both the decentralized economy and the social planner's economy. In horizontal innovation, data can be transformed into digital knowledge to promote the economic growth [Cong et al. (2021)]. In addition to horizontal innovation, the utilization of data in vertical innovation also enhances the success rate of innovation, with a gradual decrease in per capita data usage on the BGP. Moreover, as agents accumulate human capital, the economy achieves higher output levels, effectively addressing consumer privacy concerns. However, along the transitional path, insufficient data provision by both R&D sectors leads to lower economic growth rates or more intense economic fluctuations, necessitating policy interventions.

in the labour market. The finding is robust with the use of the quantile regression approach, controlling for firm and worker specific information. One plausible explan-ation is that the Stolper – Samuelson theorem, which assumes that increasing international trade will decrease the skill wage, is unlikely to hold in the context of a developing economy, where the skilled labour is in short supply. Robert P. Giloth ’ s paper, entitled ‘ The role of intermediaries in US workforce and education innovation ’ , analyses the role of intermediaries in the US education and workforce domains in terms of overcoming fragmented institutions and solving mismatch problems. This study explores five mismatches prevalent in the US labour market and their associated intermediary solutions, including organising business to improve human resources, creating improved pathways from school to work, integrat-ing and emphasising multiple education investments, linking workforce and economic development, and improving access to and use of data for design, performance man-agement and advocacy. In conclusion, the study suggests that intermediaries have been most effective in the US when aligned with education and workforce system improve-ment and redesign, not as parallel and separate efforts. The result may also provide implications for other countries that use intermediaries as a potential institutional solu-tion to the labour market mismatch.

Since its market-oriented reforms in the early 1980s, the Chinese economy has been growing rapidly for more than three decades.

Due to its fast economic growth and lifestyle changes, China is experiencing a rapid epidemiological transition from communicable to noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). Mental disorder such as depression is an important yet often neglected NCD and is becoming a growing cause of disability, suicides, and disease burden. This paper provides the first nationally representative estimate of the medical cost attributable to depression and depressive symptoms among the adult population in China. On the basis of the 2012 China Family Panel Studies survey, our results indicate that these mental health conditions have significant impacts on the individual medical expenditure, and they jointly contribute to 14.7% of total personal expected medical spending in China, with depression and depressive symptoms accounting for 6.9% and 7.8%, respectively. Given that patients with mental illness face multiple psychological and institutional barriers in seeking appropriate treatment, the high depression-induced medical costs may be primarily driven by the cost-shifting effect from mental health care to general health care, as mental disorders often coexist with other NCDs such as diabetes and hypertension. As an implication, our study calls for an urgent reform of China's mental health and insurance systems to remove the policy-induced obstacles for the access to mental health care resources.