A new book by Oriana Skylar Mastro offers a novel framework to explain China's 30-year journey to great power status through strategic emulation, exploitation, and entrepreneurship.
Regulating Under Uncertainty: Governance Options for Generative AI
Florence G'Sell lays out all the options that are “on the table” for regulating artificial intelligence and increasing communication, cooperation, and transparency among the technology's many stakeholders.
Economic Development and Cultural Change,
March 15, 2024
We study how an elite college education affects social mobility in China. China provides an interesting context because its college admissions rely mainly on the scores of a centralized exam, a system that has been the subject of intense debate. Combining the data from a large-scale college graduate survey and a nationally representative household survey, we document three main findings.First, attending an elite college can change one’s fate to some extent. It raises the child’s rank in the income distribution by almost 20 percentiles. Nevertheless, it does not change the intergenerational relationship in income ranks or guarantee one’s entry into an elite occupation or industry. Second, while elite college access rises with parental income, the disparity is less pronounced in China than in the United States. In China, top-quintile children are 2.3 times more likely to attend an elite college compared to bottom-quintile children, versus an 11.2-fold difference in the U.S. Third, the score-based cutoff rule in elite college admission is income neutral. Overall, these findings reveal both the efficacy and limitations of China’s elite colleges in shaping social mobility.
As government agencies move to adopt AI across a range of programs, choices made in system design can ensure individuals’ ability to effectively challenge decisions made about them.
To better understand the impacts of parenting interventions (e.g., parental training of psychosocial stimulating activities) on child developmental outcomes and design effective policies to benefit young children, it is essential to identify the mechanisms through which the interventions work. To this end, this paper presents the results of two randomized controlled trials that offered home visitation, parenting trainings to 435 households (with 527 households as the control group) in 174 villages across three provinces in China. The findings from the randomized controlled trials showed that the interventions significantly improved child cognitive development and had a positive effect on the primary caregivers’ parenting practices and their parenting beliefs. The analysis suggests three possible mechanisms through which the parenting interventions affected child cognitive development: changing the parenting beliefs of the primary caregivers, shifting the parenting practices of the primary caregivers, and improving the primary caregivers’ parenting beliefs, thus fostering better parenting practices.
Given the size of the problem and the scientific evidence that timely intervention can improve long-term outcomes, an important question is how to best scale-up early childhood development (ECD) interventions in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). A key component of the solution is financing. However, there has been little research on the question of whether cost-sharing models can equitably and sustainably finance ECD programs at scale in LMICs. We built parenting centers in two rural communities of Western China to teach caregivers how to stimulate child development through fun and interactive activities. We used the Becker-Degroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism to elicit the household willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a one-month pass to the parenting centers. The results of the BDM suggest that a cost-sharing model would not be suitable for China's rural population at least in the short-run. Demand was found to be highly elastic. In addition, we found limited evidence of selection effects. We also found no evidence of sunk-cost effects.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
February 20, 2024
From Mesopotamian cities to industrialized nations, gossip has been at the center of bonding human groups. Yet the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article argues that gossip evolves because its dissemination of individuals’ reputations induces individuals to cooperate with those who gossip. As a result, gossipers proliferate as well as sustain the reputation system and cooperation.
Patient Education and Counseling,
February 15, 2024
Objectives Patient satisfaction is an essential indicator of the doctor-patient relationship. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between primary care quality and patient satisfaction for non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in rural western China.
Methods The study utilized the standardized patients (SPs) approach to present typical symptoms of unstable angina and diabetes to rural healthcare providers. After the consultations, the SPs completed a satisfaction survey. Ordinary least squares and quantile regression were used to examine the association between quality of primary care and patient satisfaction.
Results We examined 178 anonymous SPs visits. The results showed that higher process quality for angina SPs was correlated with stronger satisfaction for provider ability at a low quantile of ability satisfaction. For diabetes SPs, higher process quality increased overall satisfaction at a low quantile of overall satisfaction, whereas a correct diagnosis significantly contributed to communication satisfaction at a high quantile of communication satisfaction.
Conclusions The study found positive associations between process and diagnosis quality and SPs satisfaction. Notably, the influence of process quality was most significant among patients with lower satisfaction levels.
