Y Xie
Biographic Data
| ID | 34974 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Y Xie |
| GIVEN NAMES | Y |
| FAMILY NAME | Xie |
| SIGNATURE | XIE Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | Princeton University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3240-8620 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 727 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The “Model Minority” from Education to the Workplace
In June 2023, the US Supreme Court struck down race-based affirmative action in university admissions—a decision largely due to allegations that elite universities had engaged in racial discrimination against Asian American applicants. Central to both sides of the affirmative action debate was the recognition that stereotypes of Asian Americans as “model minorities” in the classroom played a role in college admissions. While much attention has fo…
What Makes a Desirable Spouse in China? New Evidence From a National Survey Experiment
Objective This study examines unmarried Chinese people's preferred characteristics of a spouse and how the preferences vary by gender and across socioeconomic groups. Background Extensive research has attempted to uncover mate selection preferences, a crucial factor shaping who marries whom. Predominantly analyzing observational data, however, existing research provides only indirect inferences about individuals' mate preferences independent of s…
Research and Application of the Safety Management Model “Network‐Wall‐Field” Based on the Concept of System Safety
Traditional safety management focuses on the addition of safety protection devices and strict control of personnel behaviour to safeguard the safety of individuals and equipment. However, the concept of system safety emphasizes a comprehensive analysis of multi‐dimensional factors such as social, cultural and intrinsic safety levels, based on the principles of accident causation. This approach aims to eliminate or reduce risks in production syste…
Network analysis in depressed adolescents with suicidal ideation
Emotional abuse and bridge symptoms (e.g., fatigue and uncontrolled worry) are critical intervention targets for suicide-prevention interventions. A multimodal approach integrating cognitive-behavioral therapy for core symptom management, family-based interventions to address attachment disruptions, and policy initiatives to reduce childhood abuse is recommended
Unilateral and bilateral load-velocity relationships in athletes
This study validated the use of velocity-based resistance training (VBT) to optimize strength training in boxing. Both unilateral and bilateral exercises showed consistent L-V relationships, supporting individualized load prescription. Bilateral exercises enhanced velocity output, while unilateral exercises helped correct inter-limb strength asymmetries and improve sport-specific stability
Occupational Percentile Rank
In this paper, we propose a method for constructing an occupation-based socioeconomic index that can easily incorporate changes in occupational structure. The resulting index is the occupational percentile rank for a given cohort, based on contemporaneous information pertaining to educational composition and the number of workers at the occupation level. An occupation may experience an increase or decrease in its occupational rank due to changes …
Raising hope
Children play such a crucial role in Chinese families that their future socioeconomic prospects significantly influence parents’ decisions regarding fertility. Drawing on data from the 2010–2018 Chinese General Social Survey, this study investigates the impact of macro-level intergenerational mobility on fertility intentions. The findings reveal a positive association between relative mobility and desired family size. Mediation analysis highlight…
Social Mobility as Causal Intervention
The study of mobility effects is an important subject of study in sociology. Empirical investigations of individual mobility effects, however, have been hindered by one fundamental limitation, the unidentifiability of mobility effects when origin and destination are held constant. Given this fundamental limitation, we propose to reconceptualize mobility effects from the micro- to macro-level. Instead of micro-level mobility effects, the primary f…
Trend Analysis with Pooled Data from Different Survey Series
The use of pooled data from different repeated survey series to study long-term trends is handicapped by a measurement difficulty: different survey series often use different scales to measure the same attitude and thus generate scale-incomparable data. In this article, the authors propose the latent attitude method (LAM) to address this scale-incomparability problem, on the basis of the assumption that attitudes measured by ordinal categories re…
Restoring culture and capital to cultural capital
An extensive sociological literature maintains that cultural capital is pivotal in perpetuating social inequalities. However, empirical tests of cultural capital theory focus on how culture influences educational outcomes, not earnings, and they mainly look for cultural differences across social classes within societies. We propose a direct test of economic returns to cultural capital based instead on differences in national cultures across count…
Paying for the Prestige
Much research has focused on the relative success of Asian Americans in U.S. higher education, particularly their high rates of enrollment and graduation compared to White Americans. In this research, we investigate one factor that may influence these outcomes: whether Asian American families invest more financially in their children's college education. Using data from the 2015-2016 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, we find that Asian Am…
The shift in ideal family size
Motivated by role theory and the concept of the “self-fulfilling prophecy”, this study examines how entries into marriage and parenthood affect the fertility ideals of men and women in China. To address this question, we apply propensity score matching estimators to data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) within a counterfactual framework. We find that marriage and parenthood have a positive effect on fertility ideals, and this result rem…
Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage in China Over the Past Century
In the past century, China has undergone rapid and dramatic social and economic changes. This article describes trends in educational assortative marriages of cohorts born in 1906–1995 in China. We measure educational attainment relatively as an individual's percentile position in the education distribution of a 10-year birth cohort and study trends using comparable, easy-to-interpret couple rank-rank correlations. We analyze microdata samples fr…
Trends in social mobility in postrevolution China
Significance Accompanying a sharp rise in economic inequality in China since its economic reform, two countercurrents characterize the trends in China’s intergenerational social mobility. On the one hand, industrialization in postreform China has promoted occupational mobility. On the other hand, both occupational mobility net of industrialization and educational mobility in China have trended downward, reaching levels similar to those in the Uni…
The Impact of Covid-19 on Americans’ Attitudes toward China
Linking local COVID-19 and population statistics to a U.S.-based survey we recently conducted, we examine the spatial variation in the impact of COVID-19 on Americans’ attitudes toward China. The research strategy capitalizes on differential local COVID-19 incidence rates as varying dosages of COVID-19 impact across local contexts in the United States. Our results reveal negative yet heterogeneous effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on Ameri…
Between reality and perception
There are many conflicting theories about the relationship between media reports and public opinion, but few of them are supported by empirical work on large data sets. We use sentiment results on over 260,000 China-related articles in The New York Times to show that events in international relations affect media sentiment which, in turn, affects public opinion. We find that sudden shifts in US-China relations are accompanied by changes in how Th…
Social-demographic correlates of mindset in China
Mindset, growth or fixed, refers to two different beliefs people hold about the underlying nature of ability, and was first put forward by the psychologist Carol Dweck. The central role of mindset in motivation, self-regulation and interpersonal processes has been the subject of growing research interest, but there are few discussions of mindset in the context of China. Using the China Family Panel Studies, this study aims to offer a comprehensiv…
Long-term decline in intergenerational mobility in the United States since the 1850s
We make use of newly available data that include roughly 5 million linked household and population records from 1850 to 2015 to document long-term trends in intergenerational social mobility in the United States. Intergenerational mobility declined substantially over the past 150 y, but more slowly than previously thought. Intergenerational occupational rank–rank correlations increased from less than 0.17 to as high as 0.32, but most of this chan…
Social inequality in child educational development in China
Nearly all past studies on educational inequality have examined the relationship between family and children’s educational achievement in western countries. Very few have examined this question in other social contexts, such as China. This article investigates differences in factors that influence children’s development between China and western countries. Capitalizing on recent national representative data, we extend previous studies by using mo…
Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children’s Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis
Mechanisms explaining the negative effects of parental divorce on children's attainment have long been conjectured and assessed. Yet few studies of parental divorce have carefully attended to the assumptions and methods necessary to estimate causal mediation effects. Applying a causal framework to linked U.S. panel data, we assess the degree to which parental divorce limits children's education among whites and nonwhites and whether observed lowe…
The influences of family background and structural factors on children’s academic performances
It is well known that children’s academic performances are affected by both their family backgrounds and contextual or structural factors such as the urban–rural difference and regional variation. This article evaluates the relative importance of family background versus structural factors in determining children’s academic achievements across three different societies: China, the United States of America, and Germany, analyzing data from five la…
Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in the Presence of Self-Selection
An essential feature common to all empirical social research is variability across units of analysis. Individuals differ not only in background characteristics but also in how they respond to a particular treatment, intervention, or stimulation. Moreover, individuals may self-select into treatment on the basis of anticipated treatment effects. To study heterogeneous treatment effects in the presence of self-selection, Heckman and Vytlacil develop…
Does the school cutoff date cause the disadvantage for children born in July and August
Compulsory education systems usually specify a cutoff date regulating the precise age for entry into primary school. Existing literature from the USA and Europe has demonstrated that children born just before the cutoff date are disadvantaged in academic performance and has formalized this phenomenon as the “age position effect.” A recent study by Liu and Li (Sociol Stud 6:169–245, 2015) reported similar findings for China. Our study, however, ch…
Marginal Treatment Effects from a Propensity Score Perspective
We offer a propensity score perspective to interpret and analyze the marginal treatment effect (MTE). Specifically, we redefine MTE as the expected treatment effect conditional on the propensity score and a latent variable representing unobserved resistance to treatment. As with the original MTE, the redefined MTE can be used as a building block for constructing standard causal estimands. The weights associated with the new MTE, however, are simp…
Social determinants of household wealth and income in urban China
Using data from a nationwide household survey-the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS)-we study how social determinants-political and market factors-are associated with wealth and income among urban households in China. Results indicate that both political and market factors contribute significantly to a household's economic wellbeing, but the political premium is substantially greater in wealth than in income. Further, political capital has a large…
The Racial Identification of Biracial Children with One Asian Parent
This article examines the socioeconomic and demographic correlates that are associated with whether biracial children with an Asian parent are racially identified with their Asian parent or with their non-Asian parent. With data extracted from the 5-percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 1990 census, we take into account explanatory variables at three levels: the child's characteristics, the parents' characteristics, and the locale's r…
Economic potential and entry into marriage and cohabitation
This article explores the relationship between economic potential and rates of entry into marriage and cohabitation. Using data from the 1990 census and the 1980–1992 High School and Beyond (Sophomore Cohort), we developed a method for explicitly estimating five time-varying measures of earnings potential. The analyses of union formation are based on an intergenerational panel study of parents and children, to which our measures of earnings poten…
Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects with Observational Data
Individuals differ not only in their background characteristics but also in how they respond to a particular treatment, intervention, or stimulation. In particular, treatment effects may vary systematically by the propensity for treatment. In this paper, we discuss a practical approach to studying heterogeneous treatment effects as a function of the treatment propensity, under the same assumption commonly underlying regression analysis: ignorabil…
Ethnic stratification in Northwest China
The debate on market reforms and social stratification in China has paid very little attention to China's ethnic minorities. We explored rising occupational stratification by ethnicity in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Analyses of census data from 1982 and 1990 pointed to educational disadvantages faced by ethinic minorities as the most plausible explanation for the change. Multivariate analysis revealed a significant increase in the effec…
The sampling design of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS)
The China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) is an on-going, nearly nationwide, comprehensive, longitudinal social survey that is intended to serve research needs on a large variety of social phenomena in contemporary China. In this paper, we describe the sampling design of the CFPS sample for its 2010 baseline survey and methods for constructing weights to adjust for sampling design and survey nonresponses. Specifically, the CFPS used a multi-stage pro…
Market Transition Theory Revisited
Xi Song, Yu Xie Sociological Science, July 21, 2014 DOI 10.15195/v1.a18 Abstract This paper revisits the market transition theory of Nee (1989), using housing as an alternative to income as a measure of socioeconomic attainment
Marrying Up by Marrying Down
Intermarriage plays a key role in stratification systems. Spousal resemblance reinforces social boundaries within and across generations, and the rules of intermarriage govern the ways that social mobility may occur. We examine intermarriage across social origin and education boundaries in the United States using data from the 1968-2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our evidence points to a pattern of status exchange-that is, persons with high …
Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children’s Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis
Mechanisms explaining the negative effects of parental divorce on children's attainment have long been conjectured and assessed. Yet few studies of parental divorce have carefully attended to the assumptions and methods necessary to estimate causal mediation effects. Applying a causal framework to linked U.S. panel data, we assess the degree to which parental divorce limits children's education among whites and nonwhites and whether observed lowe…
Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in the Presence of Self-Selection
An essential feature common to all empirical social research is variability across units of analysis. Individuals differ not only in background characteristics but also in how they respond to a particular treatment, intervention, or stimulation. Moreover, individuals may self-select into treatment on the basis of anticipated treatment effects. To study heterogeneous treatment effects in the presence of self-selection, Heckman and Vytlacil develop…
Understanding inequality in China
Drawing on past research, including my own, I set forth the following propositions: (1) inequality in China has been generated and maintained by structural collective mechanisms, such as regions and work units; (2) traditional Chinese political ideology has promoted merit-based inequality, with merit being perceived as functional in improving the collective welfare for ordinary people; and (3) many Chinese people today regard inequality as an ine…
Assessing the Effectiveness of Anchoring Vignettes in Bias Reduction for Socioeconomic Disparities in Self-rated Health among Chinese Adults
The authors investigate how reporting heterogeneity may bias socioeconomic and demographic disparities in self-rated general health, a widely used health indicator, and how such bias can be adjusted by using new anchoring vignettes designed in the 2012 wave of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). The authors find systematic variation by sociodemographic characteristics in thresholds used by respondents in rating their general health status. Suc…
The influences of family background and structural factors on children’s academic performances
It is well known that children’s academic performances are affected by both their family backgrounds and contextual or structural factors such as the urban–rural difference and regional variation. This article evaluates the relative importance of family background versus structural factors in determining children’s academic achievements across three different societies: China, the United States of America, and Germany, analyzing data from five la…
Social determinants of household wealth and income in urban China
Using data from a nationwide household survey-the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS)-we study how social determinants-political and market factors-are associated with wealth and income among urban households in China. Results indicate that both political and market factors contribute significantly to a household's economic wellbeing, but the political premium is substantially greater in wealth than in income. Further, political capital has a large…
Identification and Estimation of Causal Effects with Time-Varying Treatments and Time-Varying Outcomes
We develop an approach to identifying and estimating causal effects in longitudinal settings with time-varying treatments and time-varying outcomes. The classic potential outcome approach to causal inference generally involves two time periods: units of analysis are exposed to one of two possible values of the causal variable, treatment or control, at a given point in time, and values for an outcome are assessed some time subsequent to exposure. …
Social inequality in child educational development in China
Nearly all past studies on educational inequality have examined the relationship between family and children’s educational achievement in western countries. Very few have examined this question in other social contexts, such as China. This article investigates differences in factors that influence children’s development between China and western countries. Capitalizing on recent national representative data, we extend previous studies by using mo…
Marginal Treatment Effects from a Propensity Score Perspective
We offer a propensity score perspective to interpret and analyze the marginal treatment effect (MTE). Specifically, we redefine MTE as the expected treatment effect conditional on the propensity score and a latent variable representing unobserved resistance to treatment. As with the original MTE, the redefined MTE can be used as a building block for constructing standard causal estimands. The weights associated with the new MTE, however, are simp…
Ethnic enclaves revisited
Among rural-to-urban migrants, migrant workers from the same origins tend to concentrate in the same workplaces. When this concentration in a workplace is sufficiently dense, we may consider it a native-place enclave. According to a large literature on U.S. immigrants, enclave participation may improve the economic well-being of immigrants. This study borrows the same reasoning to evaluate whether or not working in a native-place enclave affects …
The Impact of Covid-19 on Americans’ Attitudes toward China
Linking local COVID-19 and population statistics to a U.S.-based survey we recently conducted, we examine the spatial variation in the impact of COVID-19 on Americans’ attitudes toward China. The research strategy capitalizes on differential local COVID-19 incidence rates as varying dosages of COVID-19 impact across local contexts in the United States. Our results reveal negative yet heterogeneous effects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on Ameri…
Buying out of familial obligation
For Chinese families, coresidence with elderly parents is both a form of support and a moderator of financial support. Previous literature on intergenerational support in Chinese societies has studied either coresidence or financial support independently, but not these two forms of support jointly. Using data from the 1999 "Study of Family Life in Urban China" in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Xi'an, we examined whether or not adult children, especially so…
Developmental idealism in China
This paper examines the intersection of developmental idealism with China. It discusses how developmental idealism has been widely disseminated within China and has had enormous effects on public policy and programs, on social institutions, and on the lives of individuals and their families. This dissemination of developmental idealism to China began in the 19 th century, when China met with several military defeats that led many in the country t…
Propensity Score-based Methods Versus MTE-based Methods in Causal Inference
Since the seminal introduction of the propensity score (PS) by Rosenbaum and Rubin, PS-based methods have been widely used for drawing causal inferences in the behavioral and social sciences. However, the PS approach depends on the ignorability assumption: there are no unobserved confounders once observed covariates are taken into account. For situations where this assumption may be violated, Heckman and his associates have recently developed a n…
Trends in Educational Assortative Marriage in China Over the Past Century
In the past century, China has undergone rapid and dramatic social and economic changes. This article describes trends in educational assortative marriages of cohorts born in 1906–1995 in China. We measure educational attainment relatively as an individual's percentile position in the education distribution of a 10-year birth cohort and study trends using comparable, easy-to-interpret couple rank-rank correlations. We analyze microdata samples fr…
Short-term trends in China’s income inequality and poverty
In the past three decades, income inequality in China has increased rapidly relative to both China's own past and other countries at similar levels of economic development. Using recent longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this article examines changes in income inequality and poverty prevalence between 2010 and 2012. Surprisingly, we find a modest decline in income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficients in the C…
The Logit Model and Response-Based Samples
It is well-known that, under the logit model for binary response, the random sampling and response-based sampling maximum likelihood estimators coincide for all parameters except the intercept. Citing this coincidence, many researchers have assumed the logit model and analyzed data from response-based samples as if those data were obtained by random sampling. We argue that this practice should be avoided unless the researcher really believes the …
Paying for the Prestige
Much research has focused on the relative success of Asian Americans in U.S. higher education, particularly their high rates of enrollment and graduation compared to White Americans. In this research, we investigate one factor that may influence these outcomes: whether Asian American families invest more financially in their children's college education. Using data from the 2015-2016 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, we find that Asian Am…
The Logit Model and Response-Based Samples
It is well-known that, under the logit model for binary response, the random sampling and response-based sampling maximum likelihood estimators coincide for all parameters except the intercept. Citing this coincidence, many researchers have assumed the logit model and analyzed data from response-based samples as if those data were obtained by random sampling. We argue that this practice should be avoided unless the researcher really believes the …
Structural Equation Models for Ordinal Variables
This article presents structural equation models with discrete dependent variables that refer to occupational destinations. After assuming threshold measurement models and structural models with normally distributed error terms, it is shown that the linear relationships among observed and latent continuous variables can be treated in a way that is similar to conventional structural equation models in the LISREL framework. The models that are pres…
The Racial Identification of Biracial Children with One Asian Parent
This article examines the socioeconomic and demographic correlates that are associated with whether biracial children with an Asian parent are racially identified with their Asian parent or with their non-Asian parent. With data extracted from the 5-percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 1990 census, we take into account explanatory variables at three levels: the child's characteristics, the parents' characteristics, and the locale's r…
Ethnic stratification in Northwest China
The debate on market reforms and social stratification in China has paid very little attention to China's ethnic minorities. We explored rising occupational stratification by ethnicity in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Analyses of census data from 1982 and 1990 pointed to educational disadvantages faced by ethinic minorities as the most plausible explanation for the change. Multivariate analysis revealed a significant increase in the effec…
The Tension between Generality and Accuracy
Peer Reviewed
Economic potential and entry into marriage and cohabitation
This article explores the relationship between economic potential and rates of entry into marriage and cohabitation. Using data from the 1990 census and the 1980–1992 High School and Beyond (Sophomore Cohort), we developed a method for explicitly estimating five time-varying measures of earnings potential. The analyses of union formation are based on an intergenerational panel study of parents and children, to which our measures of earnings poten…
Identification and Estimation of Causal Effects with Time-Varying Treatments and Time-Varying Outcomes
We develop an approach to identifying and estimating causal effects in longitudinal settings with time-varying treatments and time-varying outcomes. The classic potential outcome approach to causal inference generally involves two time periods: units of analysis are exposed to one of two possible values of the causal variable, treatment or control, at a given point in time, and values for an outcome are assessed some time subsequent to exposure. …
Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects with Observational Data
Individuals differ not only in their background characteristics but also in how they respond to a particular treatment, intervention, or stimulation. In particular, treatment effects may vary systematically by the propensity for treatment. In this paper, we discuss a practical approach to studying heterogeneous treatment effects as a function of the treatment propensity, under the same assumption commonly underlying regression analysis: ignorabil…
Market Transition Theory Revisited
Xi Song, Yu Xie Sociological Science, July 21, 2014 DOI 10.15195/v1.a18 Abstract This paper revisits the market transition theory of Nee (1989), using housing as an alternative to income as a measure of socioeconomic attainment
The sampling design of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS)
The China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) is an on-going, nearly nationwide, comprehensive, longitudinal social survey that is intended to serve research needs on a large variety of social phenomena in contemporary China. In this paper, we describe the sampling design of the CFPS sample for its 2010 baseline survey and methods for constructing weights to adjust for sampling design and survey nonresponses. Specifically, the CFPS used a multi-stage pro…
Between heaven and earth
Scholars have noticed that centrally-appointed officials in imperial China were not only beholden to their superiors but also acted as brokers of local interests. We characterize such a structural position as ‘dual accountability’. Although accountability to superiors is readily understandable within the Weberian framework of bureaucratic hierarchy, the reasons behind local responsiveness bear explanation. This paper attempts to explain such resp…
Has smoking really declined in China
It has been reported that the prevalence of smoking among Chinese men has decreased substantially in recent decades. Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) (1991–2009) and the triple standardization method, we assess this trend and the relative contributions to it from three explanatory factors – age, whether the person has ever smoked, and smoking cessation. Results do show that the prevalence of smoking among Chinese men h…
Short-term trends in China’s income inequality and poverty
In the past three decades, income inequality in China has increased rapidly relative to both China's own past and other countries at similar levels of economic development. Using recent longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this article examines changes in income inequality and poverty prevalence between 2010 and 2012. Surprisingly, we find a modest decline in income inequality as measured by the Gini coefficients in the C…
Assessing the Effectiveness of Anchoring Vignettes in Bias Reduction for Socioeconomic Disparities in Self-rated Health among Chinese Adults
The authors investigate how reporting heterogeneity may bias socioeconomic and demographic disparities in self-rated general health, a widely used health indicator, and how such bias can be adjusted by using new anchoring vignettes designed in the 2012 wave of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). The authors find systematic variation by sociodemographic characteristics in thresholds used by respondents in rating their general health status. Suc…
Marrying Up by Marrying Down
Intermarriage plays a key role in stratification systems. Spousal resemblance reinforces social boundaries within and across generations, and the rules of intermarriage govern the ways that social mobility may occur. We examine intermarriage across social origin and education boundaries in the United States using data from the 1968-2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our evidence points to a pattern of status exchange-that is, persons with high …
Understanding inequality in China
Drawing on past research, including my own, I set forth the following propositions: (1) inequality in China has been generated and maintained by structural collective mechanisms, such as regions and work units; (2) traditional Chinese political ideology has promoted merit-based inequality, with merit being perceived as functional in improving the collective welfare for ordinary people; and (3) many Chinese people today regard inequality as an ine…
Developmental idealism in China
This paper examines the intersection of developmental idealism with China. It discusses how developmental idealism has been widely disseminated within China and has had enormous effects on public policy and programs, on social institutions, and on the lives of individuals and their families. This dissemination of developmental idealism to China began in the 19 th century, when China met with several military defeats that led many in the country t…
Evaluating the measurement reliabilities and dimensionality of developmental idealism measures
This paper investigates the measurement of developmental idealism. Developmental idealism is a set of beliefs and values stating that modern societies and families are better than traditional ones, that modern families facilitate modern societies, and that modern societies foster modern families. Prior research has shown that developmental idealism is widespread globally but has provided little evidence about whether beliefs concerning developmen…
Ethnic enclaves revisited
Among rural-to-urban migrants, migrant workers from the same origins tend to concentrate in the same workplaces. When this concentration in a workplace is sufficiently dense, we may consider it a native-place enclave. According to a large literature on U.S. immigrants, enclave participation may improve the economic well-being of immigrants. This study borrows the same reasoning to evaluate whether or not working in a native-place enclave affects …
Propensity Score-based Methods Versus MTE-based Methods in Causal Inference
Since the seminal introduction of the propensity score (PS) by Rosenbaum and Rubin, PS-based methods have been widely used for drawing causal inferences in the behavioral and social sciences. However, the PS approach depends on the ignorability assumption: there are no unobserved confounders once observed covariates are taken into account. For situations where this assumption may be violated, Heckman and his associates have recently developed a n…
Social determinants of household wealth and income in urban China
Using data from a nationwide household survey-the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS)-we study how social determinants-political and market factors-are associated with wealth and income among urban households in China. Results indicate that both political and market factors contribute significantly to a household's economic wellbeing, but the political premium is substantially greater in wealth than in income. Further, political capital has a large…
Buying out of familial obligation
For Chinese families, coresidence with elderly parents is both a form of support and a moderator of financial support. Previous literature on intergenerational support in Chinese societies has studied either coresidence or financial support independently, but not these two forms of support jointly. Using data from the 1999 "Study of Family Life in Urban China" in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Xi'an, we examined whether or not adult children, especially so…
Does the school cutoff date cause the disadvantage for children born in July and August
Compulsory education systems usually specify a cutoff date regulating the precise age for entry into primary school. Existing literature from the USA and Europe has demonstrated that children born just before the cutoff date are disadvantaged in academic performance and has formalized this phenomenon as the “age position effect.” A recent study by Liu and Li (Sociol Stud 6:169–245, 2015) reported similar findings for China. Our study, however, ch…
Marginal Treatment Effects from a Propensity Score Perspective
We offer a propensity score perspective to interpret and analyze the marginal treatment effect (MTE). Specifically, we redefine MTE as the expected treatment effect conditional on the propensity score and a latent variable representing unobserved resistance to treatment. As with the original MTE, the redefined MTE can be used as a building block for constructing standard causal estimands. The weights associated with the new MTE, however, are simp…
Why Does Parental Divorce Lower Children’s Educational Attainment? A Causal Mediation Analysis
Mechanisms explaining the negative effects of parental divorce on children's attainment have long been conjectured and assessed. Yet few studies of parental divorce have carefully attended to the assumptions and methods necessary to estimate causal mediation effects. Applying a causal framework to linked U.S. panel data, we assess the degree to which parental divorce limits children's education among whites and nonwhites and whether observed lowe…
Sociology (28 works) · China (22 works) · Economics (20 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Geography (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Demographic economics (16 works) · Demography (16 works) · Demography (13 works) · Econometrics (13 works)