Professor Zhao’s paper “The Chinese Saving Rate: Long-Term Care Risks, Family Insurance, and Demographics” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Monetary Economics, a top macro journal.
In this article, Professor Zhao and his coauthor find that the combination of the risks faced by the elderly and the deterioration of family insurance due to the one-child policy is an important cause of the increase in China’s saving rate since 1980. This paper is the first major paper growing out of their research agenda on the Chinese economy and its implications for the rest of the world.
An article by Professor Zhao and his coauthor Ayse Imrohoroglu (USC Marshall) has been posted on VoxChina.org, an independent, non-partisan and nonprofit platform recently initiated by Princeton together with a group of scholars from other institutions including UPenn and CUHK (Shenzhen).
In this article, they discuss their research on the determinants of the Chinese saving rates. They focus on the paper “The Chinese Saving Rate: Long-Term Care Risks, Family Insurance, and Demographics”, in which they find that the combination of the risks faced by the elderly and the deterioration of family insurance due to the one-child policy is an important cause of the increase in China’s saving rate since 1980. This paper is the first major paper growing out of their research agenda on the Chinese economy and its implications for the rest of the world.
Professor Kai Zhao has had his paper titled “Social Insurance, Private Health Insurance and Individual Welfare” accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. In this paper, he develops a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model to evaluate social insurance policies. The main findings of the paper are that means tested social insurance does not only distort saving and labor supply decisions, but also has a large crowding out effect on the demand for private health insurance. However, despite the distorting effects, the net welfare consequence of eliminating social insurance is still negative. In addition, this paper finds that the existence of social insurance as a last resort is a quantitatively important reason why many Americans choose to be uninsured.
Professor Zhao and his coauthor Ayse Imrohoroglu (USC Marshall) have their paper titled “Intergenerational Transfers and China’s Social Security Reform” accepted for publication in the Journal of the Economics of Ageing. This paper grew out of their research agenda on the Chinese economy and its implications for the rest of the world. In it, they find that a model with two-sided altruism is preferred to a standard pure life-cycle model for studying social security reforms in China due to the prevalence of intergenerational links. They show that the implications of several reforms are quantitatively different from what have been found in existing studies using pure life-cycle models.
Professor Zhao was a panelist at The 9th Annual Conference on China’s Economic Development and the U.S.-China Relationship, held at The George Washington University. The panel was on China’s Macroeconomy, Urban Growth and Policy Analysis.
In it, Professor Zhao discussed his recent research on the Chinese Saving Rate.
The full schedule of the conference can be found online at:
