UC Riverside

This dissertation consists of two independent essays in applied microeconomics with a regional focus on China.

Chapter 1 is an introduction, which summarizes the research questions, data, research methods, and main findings for the following chapters.

Chapter 2 analyzes the long-run impacts of a school meal program in rural China on education and intergenerational mobility in education. Using individual level survey data and a cohort Difference-in-Differences method, I find that the program improved educational attainment for rural students. This effect was associated with improvements in health status, school attendance, and academic performance. Further analysis shows that the program also improved intergenerational mobility in education and reduced educational inequality.

Chapter 3 focuses on the environmental consequence of a fiscal hierarchy reform. Using the Province-Managing-County (PMC) reform in China as a quasi-experiment and county-level data, I find that local air quality was negatively affected by the PMC reform. This was not caused by better economic performance, since reformed counties’ GDP per capita also witnessed a significant drop. These impacts of the PMC reform were more negative for counties in provinces with greater initial spans of control. Mechanism analysis shows that reformed counties spent less on environmental protection, which could weaken environmental monitoring and enforcement, so firms in reformed counties generated more air pollutants.