Essays on development economics in China

Recent research has stressed the role of historical events on economic development. This thesis aims at understanding impacts of historical events on China's current economic outcomes. The second chapter analyzes the effect of the number of brothers an individual has on that individual's household savings rate under the current underdeveloped household financial market in urban China. I show that having an additional brother reduces an individual's household savings rate by at least five percentage points. Brothers help households by (1) sharing risks, providing a source of informal borrowing and (2) sharing the cost of supporting parents. In the third and fourth chapter I investigate the long-term impact of the send-down policy. Under the send-down policy (1968--1978) during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, more than 16 million youths were forced to move to rural areas and carry out hard manual labor. I find that the sent-down males were significantly more likely to have had education upgrading after the Cultural Revolution. Conditional on education upgrading, the sent-down males earn higher income than the non-sent-down males who also received education upgrading.Arts, Faculty ofVancouver School of EconomicsGraduat