Dr. Chih Ming Tan recently presented his work on “It’s All in the Stars: The Chinese Zodiac and the Effects of Parental Investments on Offspring’s Cognitive and Noncognitive Skill Development” at the annual Southern Economic Association meetings

Dr. Chih Ming Tan recently presented his work on “It’s All in the Stars: The Chinese Zodiac and the Effects of Parental Investments on Offspring’s Cognitive and Noncognitive Skill Development” at the annual Southern Economic Association meetings. His paper was joint work with a previous faculty member in the Dept. of Economics & Finance at UND, Dr. Xiao Wang, who is now at the University of Science and Technology of China. An abstract of his work is as follows:

“The importance of (early) parental investments in children’s cognitive and noncognitive outcomes is a question of deep policy significance. However, because parental investments are arguably endogenous, empirically estimating their importance poses a challenge. This paper exploits a rich and novel dataset, the China Family Panel Studies, and proposes a culture-specific instrumental variable based on the Chinese zodiac, in order to identify the impact of parental investments. By looking at the outcomes of children born just before and just after the cutoff for a “lucky” (or “nonlucky”) zodiac sign, we find that parents’ investments have significant effects on their offspring’s development of both cognitive and noncognitive skills.”

The Southern Economic Association is one of the oldest economics associations in the United States, dating back to a conference held in Atlanta in November 1928. Since its modest origins in the early 20th century, the Southern Economic Association has grown into a truly global professional organization today.  Membership and participation in its annual conference regularly attracts thousands of economists from more than 94 nations to share their interests in economic scholarship.