Publications

Market-oriented housing reforms and the rapid urbanization process have led to spectacular growth in the Chinese real estate sector (RES). However, the changes in the role played by this sector in the structural dynamics of the Chinese economy have not been examined sufficiently. Accordingly, we analyze the intersectoral structural changes to the Chinese RES, its linkages with the rest of the economy, and its growth sources, using four Chinese input–output tables from 2002 to 2017. We depart from existing work on the RES by using the causative matrix approach and structural decomposition analysis, and obtain three main results. First, the RES, which received little non-RES feedback during the 2002–2007 period, has subsequently received much more substantial feedback. Second, the impact of the RES on China's economic growth stems mainly from its forward linkages. Third, the growth in the RES has been driven mainly by domestic demand expansion. Our results highlight that the Chinese RES, which plays a key role in value chains, is highly dependent on its own final demand and a fall in its demand would impede economic development. An important implication of these results is that developing the national economy by stimulating the RES would not be as effective as developing the RES through stimulating the national economy.

We investigate how variations in soil productivity affect civil conflicts. We first present a model with heterogeneous land in which variations in input prices (fertilizers) affect appropriable rents and the opportunity costs of fighting. The theory predicts that spikes in input prices increase the likelihood of conicts through their effect on income and inequality, and that this effect is magni fied when soil fertility is naturally more heterogenous. We test these predictions using data on conict events covering all Sub-Saharan African countries at a spatial resolution of 0.5 x 0.5 degree latitude and longitude over the 1997-2013 period. We combine information on soil characteristics and worldwide variations in fertilizer prices to identify local exogenous changes in input costs. As predicted, variations in soil productivity triggered by variations in fertilizer prices are positively associated with conicts, especially in cells where land endowments are more heterogeneous. In addition, we find that the distribution of land fertility both within and across ethnic groups affects violence, and that the effect of between-group heterogeneity in soil quality is magnified in densely populated areas. Overall, our findings imply that inequality in access to fertile areas { an issue largely neglected in the literature dealing with the roots of Sub-Saharan African civil wars { constitutes a serious threat to peace at the local-level.

The distinction between effort and other factors, such as family background, matters for correcting policies and normative reasons when we appeal to inequality of opportunity. We take advantage of a purposefully designed survey on secondary schools in rural Bangladesh to offer a comprehensive view of the importance of overall effort when measuring inequalities of opportunity in education. The analysis comprises decomposition exercises of the predicted variance of student performance in mathematics and English by source (effort, circumstances, etc.) and subgroup (within- and between-schools) based on parametric estimates of educational production functions. Pupils’ effort, preferences, and talents contribute between 31% and 40% of the total predicted variances in performance scores. The contribution of overall effort falls by 10% when the correlation between effort and circumstances is taken into account. These findings are robust to the choice of estimation strategy (i.e. combined within- and between-schools variation models versus multilevel random-effect models). All in all, these results advocate that social determinism in education can be mitigated by individual effort at school.

We offer a flexible latent type approach to rank populations according to unequal health opportunities. Building upon the latent-class method, an approch increasingly adopted to estimate health inequalities, our contribution is to let the number of socioeconomic groups considered vary to obtain an opportunity-inequality curve for a population that gives how the between-type inequality varies with the number of types. A population A is said to have less inequality of opportunity than population B if its curve is statistically below that of population B. This version of the latent class approach allows for a robust ranking of 31 European countries regarding inequality of opportunity in health.