The efficacy of foreign aid, especially escalating Chinese aid, has been controversial. Considering the widespread malnutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa and the substantial concerns about Chinese aid, we investigate whether and how Chinese development assistance improves the nutrition of the African recipients, particularly children and women. We match Chinese aid projects and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) covering 24 SSA countries during 2000-2016. We address the causality by comparing the individuals who lived near a Chinese aid project that was effective at the time of the interview to those who were not exposed to Chinese aid projects while a nearby Chinese aid project would be initiated after the interview. We measure malnutrition by hemoglobin and anemia which are more relevant and reliable than other indicators. Our results show that Chinese aid significantly increased hemoglobin and decreased the likelihood of anemia, and the effects are more pronounced among children. In contrast to the popular expectation, health aid does not significantly improve nutrition conditions, at least in the short run. Instead, other aid projects that promote earnings and job opportunities substantially reduced malnutrition among children and women. Heterogeneity analysis further shows that Chinese aid strongly improved nutrition mainly among disadvantaged residents.

The discrimination and violence against women are widespread in the households and society in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). While the past literature underscores their institutional and cultural roots, the role of women's economic empowerment remains clouded. On the one hand, bargaining power hypothesis suggests that female employment tends to enhance women's intra-household power and reduce intimate partner violence (IPV). On the other hand, backlash hypothesis supports the opposite view. Recently the rapidly growing Chinese aid boosts the African economy and employment and provides an opportunity to revisit the relationship between women’s employment and IPV. This study evaluates the effects of Chinese aid on African women's empowerment from four aspects: IPV incidence, individual attitudes toward wife-beating, female intra-household decision-power, and female employment. We combine Chinese aid projects with 56 Demographic and Health Surveys in 30 SSA countries during 2000-2015. We identify the impacts of Chinese aid by comparing the outcomes of respondents living near an active Chinese aid project during the interview with those living close to a not-yet-implemented project at the time of the interview. We find that Chinese aid substantially reduces IPV incidence and female acceptance of wife-beating, whereas male attitudes remain almost unchanged. Increasing female employment and women’s intra-household power are the plausible underlying mechanisms. Consistently, the effects are significantly larger for the infrastructure projects that are more likely to promote women's employment and intra-household bargaining power. However, the effects of Chinese aid are limited among the recipients under the social norms and situations unfavorable to women.

The performance of government activities, including law enforcement and regulation, depends on how citizens perceive them as legitimate. Although substantial studies explore the institutional sources of legitimacy, how non-institutional factors affect perceived legitimacy remains unclear. Human societies have a long history of employing symbolic icons to enhance the authority’s legitimacy. This study reports a laboratory experiment of public goods that investigates whether and to what extent symbolic factors can enhance perceived legitimacy. In the various contexts of incentive schemes and transparency levels, an “authority” in each group decides whether to target a “citizen” for punishment after observing the contributions of “citizens”, and untargeted citizens then choose to support or hinder the authority. A symbolic scepter is issued to the authority in the treated group, while the symbol is absent in the control group. Experimental results suggest that the political symbol significantly enhances the authority’s legitimacy regardless of the payment scheme and information transparency. Further analysis shows that the political symbol is not associated with the authority’s choices on enforcement. Instead, the symbol’s effect on perceived legitimacy is mainly driven by the citizens’ side, i.e., the increasing intrinsic tendency to support authority.

This article studies the effects of Chinese aid on economic development in Africa. We geographically match Chinese aid in Africa to the satellite nightlight and other variables. Using a grid-cell panel dataset, we find that Chinese aid, particularly infrastructure projects, has significant and robust positive impacts on the economic development in Africa. Mechanism analysis suggests that Chinese aid substantially reduces violent rebel activities and growth in population and industries. The heterogeneous analysis demonstrates that Chinese infrastructure projects foster development not via resource exploitation. Moreover, the impact of Chinese infrastructure projects is not heterogeneous by the institutional quality.

This study investigates the long-term legacy of the slave trade on contemporary violence in sub-Saharan Africa. Using a geo-coded disaggregated dataset and exploiting within-country variation in slave trade intensity, we document a robust positive relationship between slave exports and contemporary conflict; the slave trade has long-lasting impacts on ethnic conflict and riots in particular. We examine the mechanisms underlying this persistence and find that the slave trade has weakened national identity, leading to a higher risk of ethnic conflict, and has also undermined economic development, which partly explains the relationship between the slave trade and riots. Furthermore, using the individual attitudes from the Afrobarometer survey, we show that the impact of the slave trade on national identity is mostly attributed to the inherited beliefs and norms rather than the external environment.

Most observed institutional arrangements, in governments, firms, and other organizations, acknowledge the effectiveness of imposing sanctioning institutions and monitoring policies to achieve particular goals. However, less attention has been paid to the influences of the delegation mechanism of sanctioning power. In particular, it remains unclear whether the mechanism influences the legitimacy of the authority/institution, in centralized institutional arrangements. We report laboratory-experimental results of a public goods game that compare the performance of exogenous (i.e., the Leviathan) versus endogenous (i.e., the Democracy) delegation of sanctioning power. Observed differences are not statistically significant, regardless of the effectiveness of sanctions imposed, tested in two experiments with different punishment/cost functions. Democratic schemes in centralized power environments should not be taken for granted. Experimental evidence contradicts the common belief of a robust causal relationship between indirect democratic institutions, collective action, and economic outcomes.

This paper examines the impact of China's High-Speed-Railway on internal migration. By exploiting the yearly variation in the city-pair connection, difference-in-differences estimation shows that HSR connection significantly promotes intercity migration. Furthermore, large cities have a huge siphon effect on small cities in terms of internal immigration after the HSR connection.

The vast increase in China's aid projects has raised mounting concerns about the effectiveness of Chinese aid. To assess Chinese development assistance in Africa from the perspective of local residents' attitude toward Chinese projects, we geographically match Chinese aid projects in Africa from 2000 to 2012 to the respondents of the Afrobarometer survey. By comparing the attitudes toward China reported by individuals who live close to ongoing Chinese projects at the time of the interview to those of individuals who live near sites where Chinese projects will be implemented in the future, this study establishes that the presence of Chinese projects induces a positive view of Chinese aid within the local population. Our mechanism analysis shows that people from all statuses can benefit from economic infrastructure projects, while the advantaged tend to have a better view of Chinese aid. In contrast, social infrastructure aid inspires a more positive view among disadvantaged people. We thus demonstrate that aid can have a differential impact on local attitudes, depending on aid types and statuses of recipients.

The fast growth and unique model of Chinese aid provide new perspectives and empirical evidence for the study of aid effectiveness. This paper employs GIS technology to match Chinese aid projects in Africa with satellite-measured nighttime lights – a proxy of economic development and converts them into 0.5 longitude) x 0.5 latitude panel data. First, we find that Chinese aid projects are positively correlated to Africa's economic development. Second, we gain a deep understanding of the mechanisms and find that the aid-growth relationship is mostly attributed to economic infrastructure aid rather than social welfare projects, direct aid as well as production and other types of projects. Spatial panel regression further validates the robustness of the empirical results and sheds light on the spillover effects of Chinese aid. Moreover, our results also suggest that Chinese aid brings some side effects on the recipient countries, as it may intensify the spatial economic inequalities.

Charity corruption scandals cause sharp declines in donations. When deciding about charitable contributions, donors are influenced by the actual share that ultimately goes to the intended recipients; however, they are also impacted by the potential veiled cost that may come from legitimate administration and advertisement costs or in some cases from unethical expenditures or corruption. Therefore, donors are confronted with a tradeoff between helping people in need and the possibility of being cheated. Individuals may justify not giving by using a self-serving biased belief that the fundraisers are corrupt. In a laboratory experiment, we find evidence that participants are more likely to exploit the shadow of fundraising cost to bias their belief and contribute less when the incentive for selfishness is greater. Further, the charitable contribution significantly increases when the moral excuse is removed by excluding the possibility of fundraisers' manipulation of the costs.

The rapid development and diffusion of new technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence makes life more convenient. At the same time, people may develop overdependence on technology to simplify everyday tasks or to reduce the level of effort required to accomplish them. We conduct a two-phase real-effort laboratory experiment to assess how external assistance affects subsequent revealed preferences for the convenience of a lower level of effort versus monetary rewards requiring greater effort. The results suggest that men treated with external help in the first phase tend to choose more difficult options with potentially higher monetary rewards. In contrast, after being treated with external help, women exhibit a stronger propensity to utilize the convenience of an easier task and are less likely to choose a more difficult option that carries higher potential earnings. .

Exploiting data from Ghanaian schools' eighth grade students collected in 2011, we estimate the causal effects of school bullying on academic achievement and gender-based mitigating approaches by using propensity score matching (PSM) and doubly robust (DR) estimator approach. We find that students victimized by bullying score at least 0.22 standard deviation lower than their peers in a standardized mathematics examination. Meanwhile, we document that the effect of bullying is significantly attenuated in the presence of female teachers in the classroom. These results hold through a set of robustness checks including placebo regressions and matching quality test. We explain the results through gender difference in teaching paradigm and conclude that a feminine management approach in class is required to reduce the effect of bullying.

The Alabama HB 56 act passed in 2011 is the strictest anti-illegal immigration bill in the United States. Using the synthetic control method to create a counterfactual Alabama, this paper provides suggestive evidence that Alabama HB 56 led to an increase in violent crime rates, but had no significant impact on property crime rates.