Abstract: I examine how the shift from an exam to a district based high school assignment rule impacts intergenerational mobility and residential inequality. A stylized model predicts that under district assignment, household income relative to one’s ability becomes a stronger predictor of achievement, and higher income households sort towards and increase housing prices in the better school districts. I test predictions utilizing a unique policy change from South Korea in the 1970s. High school admission had traditionally been exam based in South Korea. However, between 1974 and 1980 the central government shifted several cities to a school district based system. I find that the reform increased intergenerational income elasticity from 0.15 to 0.31, and that higher income households migrated to the reform cities. I next examine whether school districting altered residential land prices within a city using a first differenced boundary discontinuity design. By focusing on the immediate years before and after the creation of school districts in Seoul, I find that residential land prices increased by about 13% point more on average and by about 26% point across boundaries in the better school district. In sum, I find that the shift from a merit to a location based student assignment rule decreases intergenerational mobility and increases residential inequality.

Professor Lee's research intersects the fields of economic development, political economy, urban economics and public economics, and regionally focuses on Korea and East Asia. Some of his recent research on Korea examines the impact of economic sanctions on the urban elites in North Korea and the impact of education policy on intergenerational mobility in South Korea. His research also examines entrepreneurship and urban growth, the efficacy of disaster aid delivery, and the relationship between aid and trade. Professor Lee is a member of the US-Korea Scholar-Policymaker Nexus Program organized by the Mansfield Foundation and the Korea Foundation. He received his PhD in economics from Brown University, master of public policy from Duke University, and bachelor degree in architecture from Seoul National University. As he made the transition from architecture to economics, he worked as an architecture designer and real estate development consultant.

After more than 30 years of rapid economic growth, China is becoming the second largest economy in the world. However, China’s economy has encountered many difficulties, which has urged China to transform the development pattern in recent years. Could China’s economy be sustainable? Could it also continue to grow at its current speed? What does China’s economy look like in 2014? The environment of China’s economy is very complicated. Factors such as China’s economic reform cycle, industrialization and urbanization will influence direction and tendency of China’s economy. It will be easier to know where China’s economy is going by looking back at the path of other countries’ economic growth, especially countries like Japan and Korea.

Taiyan Huang is the President of Liaoning University and Dean of Research at the Center for China’s Private Enterprise at Renmin University. He is also President of the Society for China’s Economy Reform and Development Studies and Secretary General of Economic Theory and Practice of Chinese University’s Annual Meeting. His research interests include China’s economic reform and development.

Huang received his B.A, M.A and Ph.D in Economics from Renmin University between 1979-1988. He has published over 50 books and written over 450 papers during his academic career. He has received over 50 research awards  and grants including a Ford Foundation grant.

Over the past 35 years of the reform period Beijing has tried to make its state-owned enterprises more efficient and competitive. In the early 1990s it adopted a strategy modeled closely on the Western corporation and the equity and debt capital markets that support its operations. But China's big SOEs have demonstrated more and more independence despite outright economic and ownership control by the government and the Communist Party. And this independence has not led to greater efficiencies or, arguably, even competitiveness. Instead the National Champions represent monopolistic economic and political power. Today China's new leadership confronts the National Champions seeking to regain control over the state's principal assets. How did this happen and what can be done to reassert Beijing's rights?  

Carl E. Walter worked in China and its financial sector for over 20 years and actively participated in many of the country’s financial reform efforts. While at Credit Suisse First Boston he played a major role in China’s groundbreaking first overseas IPO in 1992. Later at Morgan Stanley he was a member of senior management at China International Capital Corporation, China’s first and most successful investment bank. While there he supported a number of groundbreaking domestic and international stock and bond underwritings for major Chinese corporations. More recently at JPMorgan he was China Chief Operating Officer and Chief Executive Officer of its China banking subsidiary. During this time Carl helped build a pioneering domestic security, risk and currency trading operation. In his spare time he enjoyed driving his Jeep to distant provinces.

A long time resident of Beijing before his recent return to the United States, Carl is fluent in Mandarin and holds a PhD from Stanford University and a graduate certificate from Peking University. In Spring 2013, Carl returned to Stanford as a visiting scholar at the Shorenstein-Asia Pacific Research Center, FSI. He is the co-author of Red Capitalism: the fragile financial foundations of China’s extraordinary rise, which has been published in Chinese in China. His earlier book, Privatizing China: inside China’s stock markets, was also published in China and, like Red Capitalism, contributed to the government’s policy debate.

This event is co-sponsored with CEAS and is part of the China under Xi Jinping series.

We use retrospectively reported data on smoking behavior of residents of Mainland China and Taiwan to compare and contrast patterns in smoking behavior over the life-course of individuals in these two regions. Because we construct the life-history of smoking for all survey respondents, our data cover an exceptionally long period of time – up to fifty years in both samples. During this period, both societies experienced substantial social and economic changes. The two regions developed at much different rates and the political systems of the two areas evolved in very different ways. More importantly, governments in the two areas set policies that caused the flow of information about the health risks of smoking to differ across the regions and over time. We exploit these differences, using counts of articles in newspapers from 1951 to present, to explore whether and how the arrival of information affected life-course smoking decisions of residents in the two areas. We also present evidence that suggests how prices/taxes and key historical events might have affected decisions to smoke.

Dean Lillard received his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago in 1991. From 1991 to 2012, he was a faculty member and senior research associate in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. In August 2012 he joined the Department Human Sciences at Ohio State University as an Associate Professor. He is Director and Project Manager of the Cross-National Equivalent File study that produces cross-national data. He is a member of the American Economics Association, the Population Association of America, the International Association for Research on Income and Wealth, the International Health Economics Association, the American Society for Health Economics, a Research Associate at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin, Germany, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves on the advisory board of the Danish National Institute for Social Research in Copenhagen, Denmark and the Cross-National Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training Program – a collaborative program run by the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), and together with the Mershon Centre at OSU.

Dean Lillard's current research focuses on health economics, the economics of schooling, and international comparisons of economic behavior. His research in health economics is primarily focused on the economics of the marketing and consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. His research on the economics of schooling includes studies of direct effects of policy on educational outcomes and on the role that education plays in other economic behaviors such as smoking, production of health, and earnings. His cross-national research ranges widely from comparisons of the role that obesity plays in determining labor market outcomes to comparisons of smoking behavior cross-nationally.