Title: Aggregate Implications of Occupational Inheritance in China and India  

Speaker: Ting Ji  

Abstract: This paper documents occupational inheritance--interpreted as children inheriting their parents' occupations--in China, India, and other countries. We categorize potential reasons of the prevalence of occupational inheritance in China and India into two main groups: (1) labor market frictions, e.g., household registration system (“hukou”), which ties rural families to agriculture in China, and the caste system, which restricts young workers' occupation choices in India, and (2) barriers to acquiring human capital, e.g., low availability of school education and workplace training. Based on a tractable occupation choice model, counterfactual experiments suggest that if the impediments mentioned above could be reduced to the US level, labor productivity would grow by 62 to 78% in China and over fourfold in India. In addition, China has realized 56 to 68% of this growth potential from the 1980s to 2009.  

About Ting Ji : He is an Assistant Professor in the School of International Trade and Economics at CUFE. He completed his Ph.D. in Economics at UCLA in May 2015. His research focuses on macroeconomics and international economics.

Date: March, 24th, 2016  

Time: 15:40-17:00 PM  

Location: Room 608, Academic Hall, CUFE