Economic Network

Journal of Population Economics

Loren Brandt (University of Toronto), Aloysius Siow (University of Toronto), and Hui Wang (Peking University) received the 2016 Kuznets Prize for their paper „Compensating for unequal parental investments in schooling,” Journal of Population Economics (2015), 28(2), pp. 423-462. The prize honors the best article published in the Journal of Population Economics in 2015.

The winning paper investigates how rural families in China use marital and post-marital transfers to compensate their sons for unequal schooling expenditures. Using a common behavioral framework, the authors derive two methods for estimating the relationship between parental transfers and schooling investments: the log-linear and multiplicative household fixed-effects regression models. Using data from a unique household-level survey, the authors strongly reject the log-linear specification. Results from the multiplicative model suggest that when a son receives 1 yuan less in schooling investment than his brother, he obtains 0.47 yuan more in transfers as partial compensation. Since their measure of transfers represents a substantial fraction of total parental transfers, sons with more schooling likely enjoy higher lifetime consumption. Redistribution within the household may be limited by either the parents’ desire for consumption equality or bargaining constraints imposed by their children. Controlling for unobserved household heterogeneity and a fuller accounting of lifetime transfers are quantitatively important. Download the winning paper free of charge

The Kuznets Prize honors the best article published in the Journal of Population Economics.  The Prize Committee includes the Journal’s Editor-in-Chief, IZA Director Klaus F. Zimmermann, and the Journal’s Editors, Alessandro Cigno, Erdal Tekin, and Junsen Zhang. The Prize was awarded by the Editor-in-Chief on January 4th, 2016 during the 2016 American Economic Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. See pictures from the ceremony here.

For a limited time only:   Download the winning paper free of charge!