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Contact Information:
Department of Economics emliu at uh dot edu Fields of
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Research
“Does “in Utero” Exposure to Illness Matter? The 1918 Influenza Epidemic in Taiwan as a Natural Experiment” (with Ming-Jen Lin) (Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Development Economics)
ONLINE APPENDIX [Email me for the wild bootstrap Stata code which is used in this paper]
This paper uses the sudden and unexpected 1918 influenza pandemic as a natural experiment to test whether conditions in early life (in utero) affect long run developmental outcomes. By combining several historical and current Taiwanese datasets, we find that exposure to influenza while in utero indeed has a profound adverse effect on outcomes in later life. The pandemic cohort are less educated, shorter height as teenagers, more likely to have various health issues including respiratory problems, glaucoma and diabetes in old age. The result is consistent with the fetal origins hypothesis.
Time to Change What to Sow: Risk Preferences and Technology Adoption Decisions of Cotton Farmers in China Accepted, the Review of Economics and statistics
The slow diffusion of new technology in the agricultural sector of developing countries has long puzzled development economists. While most of the current empirical research on technology adoption focuses on credit constraints and learning spillovers, this paper examines the role of individual risk attitudes in the decision to adopt a new form of agricultural biotechnology in China. I conducted a survey and a field experiment to elicit the risk preferences of 320 Chinese farmers, who faced the decision of whether to adopt genetically modified Bt cotton a decade ago. Bt cotton is more effective in pest prevention and thus requires less pesticides than traditional cotton. In my analysis, I expand the measurement of risk preferences beyond expected utility theory to incorporate prospect theory parameters such as loss aversion and nonlinear probability weighting. Using the parameters elicited from the experiment, I find that farmers who are more risk averse or more loss averse adopt Bt cotton later. Farmers who overweight small probabilities adopt Bt cotton earlier.
Risk Preferences and Pesticide Use by Cotton Farmers in China (With JiKun Huang) Accepted, The Journal of Development Economics Online Appendix
Despite insect-resistant Bt cotton has been lauded for its ability to reduce the use of pesticides, studies have shown that Chinese Bt cotton farmers continue to use excessive amounts of pesticides. Using results from a survey and an artefactual field experiment, we find that farmers who are more risk averse use greater quantities of pesticides. We also find that farmers who are more loss averse use lesser quantities of pesticides. This result is consistent with our conceptual framework and suggestive evidence where farmers behave in a loss averse manner in the health domain and place more weight on the importance of health over money in the loss domain.
Does Sorry Work? The Impact of Apology Laws on Medical Malpractice
(with Benjamin Ho) (2011) Vol. 43(2), 141-167, The Journal of RISK and Uncertainty Online Appendix
Featured in Wall Street Journal Harvard Business Review Online
Apologies made by physicians for adverse medical events have been identified as a mitigating factor in whether patients decide to litigate. However, doctors are socialized to avoid apologies because apologies admit guilt and invite lawsuits. An apology law, which specifies that a physician’s apology is inadmissible in court, is written to encourage patient-physician communication. Building on a simple model, we examine whether apology laws at the State level have an impact on malpractice lawsuits and settlements. Using a difference-in-differences estimation, we find that State-level apology laws could expedite the settlement process. Using individual level data, we also find that apology laws have the greatest reduction in average payment size and settlement time in cases involving more severe patient outcomes.
What’s an Apology Worth? Difference-in-Differences Analysis of State Apology Laws on Medical Malpractice Payouts (with Benjamin Ho) (2011) Vol. 8(S1), 179-199, The Journal of Empirical Legal Studies
Past studies find that apologies affect the outcomes of medical malpractice litigation, but such studies have largely been limited to laboratory surveys or case studies. Following Ho and Liu (2010), we use the passage of state-level apology laws that exclude apologies from being used as evidence in medical malpractice cases, and estimate that apologizing to a patient in cases of medical malpractice litigation reduces the average payout by $32,000. This paper seeks to unpack the mechanism of apologies by examining the differential impact of apologies laws by various sub-samples. We find that apologies are most valuable for cases involving obstetrics and anesthesia, for cases involving infants, and for cases involving improper management by the physician and failures to diagnose.
A Meta-Analysis of the Estimates of Returns to Schooling in China
Many studies have found that the returns to education in China from the 1980s to early 1990s were astonishingly low. The estimates of the returns to education also vary considerably across studies. This paper perform a meta-analysis to investigate how changes over time, model specifications, differences in data sets, and variable definitions could contribute to the differences in the estimates. The results show that approximately 15 percent of the variation can be explained by changes over time, and the typical positive relationship between wages and education did not prevail at the onset of the market reform. However, since the reform, returns to education have increased approximately 0.3 percentage point a year, and this strong increasing trend shows no sign of abating. The increasing reward for human capital accumulation is a positive sign that suggests China has been successful at moving the labor market toward a market economy.
Urban Ethnic Minority Disadvantages in China Labor Market? Evidence from Coastal Provinces (With REza Hasmath and Benjamin Ho) Under review
Work in Progress
Who is Coming to Experiment? A Cautionary Tale from China (with Paul Frijters and Sherry Tao Kong)
A Foreign Affair: Fertility and Divorce Responses of Local Women Due to the Influx of Foreign Brides (with Lena Edlund and Jin-Tan Liu)
Rural Property Rights, Returns to Scale and Contracts in China (with Shing-Yi Wang and Yongxiang Wang)
Adoption of Water Cleaning Technology in China (with Peter Savelyev and JiKun Huang)
Confucianism and Social Preferences (with Juanjuan Meng and Joseph Wang)
Experiment
How Risk Averse Are You Compared to Chinese Cotton Farmers? Try the experiment (click on the link!) Experiment (modeled after Tanaka, Camerer and Nguyen's design)
Average Chinese Farmers have σ = 0.52 (change of notation, it's 1-σ); λ = 3.47; α=0.69
Field Work
I have worked with the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy to collect data from farmers in rural China (winter 2006) photos
I help design the experimental part of Rural-Urban Migration in China projects (summer 2009) photos