Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis study analyses the legal consciousness of Chinese citizens during the COVID‐19 pandemic when the authoritarian state invoked heavy penalties to deter noncompliance with its excessive COVID‐19 restrictions. China used the approach of "killing the chicken to scare the monkey," publicly punishing those who violated restrictions in order to deter noncompliance. This article explains why ordinary citizens supported this selective application of the law, as well as how the possibility of being the "chicken" contributed to their compliance (or noncompliance) with excessive COVID‐19 restrictions. It suggests that the uncertainty and unpredictability of law in the authoritarian state bred fear, which then led to compliance, regardless of the lack of procedural fairness. People's dissatisfaction with the rules, however, led them to tolerate and even support the noncompliance of people they trusted.

Abstract
The concept of legal pluralism was introduced to China in the mid-1990s to address the conflict between state law and local norms and customs. More than two decades after its introduction, the scope of legal pluralism in China has shifted to the coexistence and interaction between state law and nonstate orders. In this article, I review theoretical discussions and empirical studies on legal pluralism in China. The existing studies on legal pluralism focus mostly on rural villages, which marginalizes the lived experience of urban residents who are also caught in China's rapid legal transplantation in recent decades. At the same time, law and society scholars who study labor dispute resolution in urban China tend to frame the questions as legal mobilization, rather than legal pluralism. The term qingli 情理[commonsense feelings of justice] is a common theme underlying the scholarship of legal pluralism and legal mobilization in China, and thus it has the potential to bring them together and bridge the findings of the two bodies of scholarship. This article contributes to the literature on Chinese law and society by demonstrating the role that qingli plays in bridging different areas of sociolegal studies.

AbstractLegal scholars tend to understand dignity as an intrinsic value that each individual gains at birth. This article aims to rethink dignity from a relational perspective. As dignity is highly dependent on other people's judgement and evaluations in China, I use "relational dignity" to stress the precarious and relational nature of dignity in societies in which people attach great importance toguanxinetworks. I discuss how relational dignity and state law interact to shape leftover women's choices in marriage and childbearing. The precarious and relational nature of dignity motivates leftover women to follow dominant social norms in order to fit in. As a result, it reinforces state law's discrimination against unmarried women and single mothers. On the other hand, the rubber-stamp quality of state law enables leftover women to use legal recognition to win societal recognition and attain relational dignity.

This thesis consists of three studies, which explore topics related to labor economics. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the returns on student loans and student loan repayment policy, respectively. Chapter 4 examines the returns to skill and the evolution of skills at older ages. In Chapter 2 (co-authored with Lance Lochner), we study rates of return on government student loans in Canada using novel administrative data from the Canada Student Loans Program. We exploit rich information on personal characteristics, loan amounts, field of study, and institution of attendance to explain differences in rates of return across different types of borrowers. We find that field of study is a particularly important determinant of rates of return, explaining 60-70% of the variation in predicted returns across borrowers, while institution differences explain only about 10% of the variation. We also show that if private lenders were to cream-skim borrowers with predicted returns above 10% (5%), the average return would fall from the current -5% to -6.4% (-9.4%), raising the cost of the government student loan program and adverse selection concerns. In Chapter 3, I study the effects of introducing an income-based student loan repayment (IBR) plan when considering labor market risks and the insurance provided by parents. I develop a dynamic life-cycle model with endogenous parents-to-children transfers, together with children's education, borrowing, repayment, and labor supply decisions. After estimating the model using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, I quantify the impacts of introducing an IBR while keeping the government budget constant. IBR crowds out savings and parental transfers as it provides more insurance to borrowers. Interestingly, a weak labor supply response to IBR suggests that moral hazard is not a concern. Further, the college enrollment rate increases, and the largest gains are for low-income and low-ability families. Finally, aggregate welfare increases with relatively low-income families benefiting the most. In Chapter 4 (co-authored with Lance Lochner, Youngmin Park, and Youngki Shin), we show that repeated cross-section data with multiple skill measures (one continuous and repeated) available each period are sufficient to nonparametrically identify the evolution of skill returns and cross-sectional skill distributions. With panel data and the same available measurements, the dynamics of skills can also be identified. Our identification strategy motivates a multi-step nonparametric estimation strategy. We further show that if any continuous repeated measurement is shown to be linear in skills, a much simpler GMM estimator can be used. Using Health and Retirement Survey data on men ages 52+ from 1996-2016, we show that one of the available (continuous and repeated) skill measures (word recall) is linear in skills and implement our GMM estimation approach. Our estimates suggest that the returns to skill were fairly stable from the mid-1990s to the Great Recession and rising thereafter. We document considerable differences in skills and lifecycle skill profiles over ages 52-70 across cohorts, with more recent cohorts possessing lower skills in their mid-50s but experiencing much weaker skill declines with age. We also document skill differences by education and race, which are stable across ages and explain roughly one-third and one-half, respectively, of the corresponding differences in wages.

AbstractThis paper analyses how the interaction of law andqing(情) shapes ordinary Chinese people's legal consciousness. Ordinary Chinese people rely onqing, or the normal feelings, or attitudes of the public, to judge whether a particular law is just and how they should react to the law. By investigating Chinese leftover women's legal consciousness regarding marriage and childbearing, this article has developed a theory to discuss Chinese people's different forms of legal consciousness either when the law is in opposition toqingor when it is in alliance withqing.I argue that these variations of legal consciousness result from the dynamic relationship betweenqingand different types and levels of legality, including state law.

Tourism has recently been viewed as an economic growth engine for Chinese small historic cities, including Zhengding in Northern China. However, the intensive tourism-boosting projects have far more impacts on these cities than merely economic development. Yanghe Tower was first built in Zhengding in the Tang Dynasty, renovated many times, and demolished in the 1960s, although it had been included in Liang- Sicheng's surveys in 1933. The local government rebuilt the Tower in 2017 to make it a tourist attraction through an uncritical rebuilding that formed an urban unit with a texture and meaning that never existed in the city. The result is a standalone monument disjointed from its historic and morphological layering, which is crucial for the Tower's urban role and memory narrative. This paper instead reads the primary element of Yanghe Tower in its historical evolution and its relationship with the overall urban form. By reading the mutual relationship between the Tower and the urban development in both permanence and modification, the paper brings evidence of the deep structure and meanings of urban form that should guide any strategy of intervention and reconstruction beyond musealization and commodification.

In the past 40 years of reform and opening up, the political, economic and cultural exchanges and cooperation between China and other countries have been increasing. In particular, with the opening of the doors to the outside world, the intermingling and collision of various cultures and trends from the East and the West have affected the practice and development process of ideological and political education to a certain extent. With the continuous penetration of network technology, the ideological and political theoretical system under the leadership of the Party has been constantly innovated and improved. Although it has gone through the course of cancellation, restoration, development and then integration and deepening, it has also pointed out a series of new diversified development paths for ideological and political education. Therefore, against such a background, it is important to deeply understand the distinctive features of ideological and political education in the context of pluralism. Adhering to the principle of keeping pace with the times and the people-oriented education policy and exploring new paths, methods and means of ideological and political education in the context of pluralism are not only in line with the trend of development of the times, but also continue to promote the reform and development of ideological and political theory in the new era.

AbstractIt is widely accepted that the retailer's use of strategic inventory can mitigate double marginalization and improve supply chain coordination. However, the recent literature of channel coordination only considers the effects of the retailer's strategic inventory, leaving the manufacturer's incentive to hold strategic inventory mostly unexplored. In reality, there are situations where the manufacturer's inventory can be observed or inferred by the retailer and hence affects the vertical interaction. In our two‐period dynamic model, we show that the manufacturer in equilibrium may carry a positive amount of inventory, which yields a significant impact on the equilibrium decisions and the supply chain players' profits. Specifically, we find that the manufacturer's use of strategic inventory commits a lower propensity to resume production in the second period, thereby encouraging the retailer to carry more strategic inventory at a higher wholesale price in the first period. The manufacturer's use of strategic inventory always hurts the retailer's profit but may enhance channel profit, consumer surplus, and social welfare. Moreover, we show that the manufacturer can earn an even higher profit by directly committing to no replenishment in the second period, observed in industries with longer production lead time and higher production setup costs.