This paper aims to obtain an accurate estimate of China's intergenerational income mobility and to present evidence on its distributional pattern. Using panel data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) over the period 1989-2009, I find that China is less mobile than most developed countries. Then, I employ five different approaches to investigate the distributional pattern of China's intergenerational mobility across income levels. The results suggest that poor families have relatively high mobility, indicating opportunities for the poor children to escape poverty. Finally, I show that while wealthy fathers are likely to pass on their favorable economic status to their sons, rich sons come from a very wide range of family economic backgrounds.JEL Code: D31 Bratberg et al., 2005 and Pascual, 2009. 2 All tables and figures with the prefix "B" can be found in the online Appendix. 3 Although there are many papers approaching the distributional pattern problem using transition matrices, they all reach similar conclusions due to an innate flaw of the matrix. I will discuss and correct the flaw in section 4. 4 Grawe (2004) applies two-sample-two-stage-least-squares (TS2SLS) quantile regressions and estimated the IGE distribution patterns for several countries. Since most of their samples are quite small, I do not show the graphs. 5 The standard errors are adjusted for within-household correlation. If the sample is restricted to the oldest son in the household, there are fewer observations, but the results are largely unchanged.

Interstate competition for economic development has led many states to adopt targeted economic development incentive programs known as deal-closing funds. Deal-closing funds allow state officials to provide discretionary cash grants to select businesses to attract and retain economic development projects. However, whether these targeted business subsidies increase prosperity in the local economy remains unclear. The authors use evidence from Arkansas’s Quick Action Closing Fund to analyze how effective deal-closing funds are at increasing incomes and decreasing poverty. Specifically, the causal effects of the Quick Action Closing Fund on Arkansas’s county-level per capita personal income and poverty rates are estimated using a synthetic control approach. The results largely suggest that the business subsidy program fails to increase incomes and lower poverty rates over the long term, at least at the county level. These findings should serve as a caution to policy makers who wish to improve incomes and poverty rates with targeted business subsidies.

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Visible expenditures which convey higher socioeconomic status may help individuals differentiate themselves in the marriage market when there is competition for partners and imperfect information. We examine a unique dataset of automobile purchasers in China to investigate the extent to which skewed sex ratios influence expenditure decisions for this highly visible commodity. Using a triple difference approach, we show that unmarried male consumers who face an unfavorable sex ratio purchase more expensive, luxury vehicles than their married peers. Lower income borrowers and those residing in regions with the worst sex ratios exhibit the largest relative degree of conspicuous consumption. In addition to the direct cost of consumption signaling, we demonstrate that this behavior generates negative externalities in the form of lower average fuel economy and higher average vehicle weight. As it has worsened sex ratios, status competition and the associated negative repercussions we identify represent unintended consequences of China's one child policy. (JEL O12, E21, J12)