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Cosponsored by HKUST IEMS and the Department of
Economics, the conference featured a keynote address by
Mark Rosenzweig
of Yale University and presentations of
new research on wage determination, education, and health
by many of the leading labor economists in Asia, including
Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, Japan, Korea, and
Singapore.
Prof. Rosenzweig began the conference by detailing his
research on the benefits of a rainfall index insurance
product offered in a randomized control trial in India to both
agricultural land owners and agricultural wage laborers. He
found that selling insurance only to land-owning cultivators
(and not to landless workers) can make wage laborers
worse off relative to no insurance being offered at all due to
increased wage volatility.
Two papers offered new insights into the economic
returns to college education in China.
Xinzheng Shi
of
Tsinghua University found that China’s expansion of college
education led to declining returns to schooling for young
college graduates but rising returns to schooling for older
college graduates. He suggested that complementarities
between older skilled workers and both younger skilled
workers and less skilled workers can explain these changes.
Hongbin Li
of Tsinghua University found that the returns
to college education are higher in cities that import more
capital equipment, suggesting a link between globalization,
technology, and the college skill premium.
National Taiwan University’s
Claire Hsiu-Han Shih
and
Ming-Jen Lin
investigated the impact of early life exposure
to malaria on adult outcomes by using Taiwan’s 1950 malaria
eradication campaign as a natural experiment to compare
birth cohorts with different levels of exposure to the disease.
They found that malaria eradication led to significantly
higher educational attainment and incomes for men and
their families, with no similar positive benefit found for adult
women.
In 2010, the Wall Street Journal reported on a puzzling
trend that birth weights have been declining recently in
the US. Another recent trend is that more and more women
are choosing to deliver by Caesarean section for reasons of
convenience.
Sok Chul Hong
and
Jungmin Lee
of Sogang
Learn more about the event at
University analyzed a large dataset on births and infant health
outcomes, finding that the two trends are linked: electing to
induce labor can increase the chances of delivering a weaker
child more susceptible to infant mortality. This suggests that
policies should promote awareness of the health risks of
induced births, and perhaps make it more difficult or costly
for mothers to induce births without sound health reasons.
Other presenters included
Masaru Sasaki
(Osaka University),
Junsen Zhang
(Chinese University of Hong Kong),
Yasuyuki
Sawada
(University of Tokyo),
Christina Jenq
(HKUST),
Izumi Yokoyama
(Hitotsubashi University),
Seik Kim
(Korea
University),
Shuaizhang Feng
(Shanghai University of
Finance and Economics),
Sujata Visaria
(HKUST),
Myoung-
jae Lee
(Korea University),
Jin-Young Choi
(Goethe
University Frankfurt),
Li Han
(HKUST), and
Kamhon Kan
(Academia Sinica, Taiwan).
8TH ASIAN CONFERENCE ON APPLIED MICRO-ECONOMICS/ECONOMETRICS –
THEME: LABOR ECONOMICS
(2014.11.28-29)
OTHER HKUST IEMS ACADEMIC SEMINARS
Christopher A. Hartwell
2014.11.04
Center for Social and Economic Research
The Impact of Financial Institutions
on Property Rights – and the Impact
of Institutions on Financial Volatility in
Transition Economies
Mark Blyth
2014.09.16
Brown University
The Ten-Year Long Recession: Why the
Future of Europe is Not Bright, and
Why this matters to Asia (Social Science
Seminar co-sponsored by HKUST IEMS)
Denis Simon
2014.10.21
Arizona State University
China’s Evolving International Science
and Technology Relations: Opportunities
and Challenges
Nicholas R. Lardy
2014.09.15
Peterson Institute for International
Economics
Markets over Mao: The Rise of Private
Business in China (Social Science Seminar
co-sponsored by HKUST IEMS)
