Paper Co-Authored by Prof. Yi Junjian Makes it to Journal of Political Economy
Mar 10-2023
A paper by Prof. Yi Junjian and his two co-authors has been published in the 2023 February edition of Journal of Political Economy, one of the top five journals in economics.
The paper is titled Multidimensional Premarital Investments with Imperfect Commitment, and the two co-authors are Prof. V. Bhaskar of Department of Economics, University of Texas at Austin, and Li Wenchao, a research fellow with School of Economics and Management, Tongji University.
The authors analyze premarital investments in human capital and housing when individuals are unable to make binding commitments to share their labor income with a prospective spouse. They find that investments are distorted if there are gender differences in bargaining power over own labor income or marriage market imbalances. Distortions are magnified when ex-ante bargaining power favors one sex (e.g. women in China) and ex-post bargaining power favors the other (e.g. men in China), since parents of boys will increase housing investments in order to credibly commit to share more resources with the boy’s potential wife, possibly crowding out human capital investments.
Prof. Yi Junjian is PKU Bo Ya Distinguished Professor and NSD Professor of Economics. His research focuses on human capital economics; AI economics and development economics; labor and population economics; health and medical care economics, medical care big data analytics; econometrics, policy evaluation; behavioral economics. He received Ph.D. from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2011. As a postdoctor at Department of Economics, the University of Chicago, he worked with his tutors Prof. James J. Heckman (Nobel laureate in Economics, 2000) and Prof. Gary S. Becker (Nobel laureate in Economics, 1992). Prof. Yi has published papers in internationally leading journals such as Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Development Economics, and The Lancet.