UC Riverside

This dissertation consists of three independent essays with focus on crises and socio-economic development that sit at the intersection of Political Economy, Development Economics, and Public Economics.

Chapter 1 examines how the impact of traumatic experiences on contemporary trust could vary across different initial social capital levels within the context of the Confucian clan and the Great Chinese Famine.

Chapter 2 offers the first comprehensive examination of the economic impacts of China’s zeroCOVID policy. To achieve this, we utilize an original panel dataset that includes county-level data on daily COVID risk levels.

Chapter 3 studies the effect of China’s anti-contagious policy on labor market outcomes in 2020 by exploiting variation in the duration of the zero-Covid policy in China, which is triggered by the outbreak of new cases of COVID-19 in a 14-day observation window.