China Working Group meeting.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meeting

The NBER's Working Group on China met in Cambridge on October 13. NBER Research Associate Shang-Jin Wei of the IMF organized the meeting. The following papers were discussed:

Douglas Almond, Columbia University and NBER; Lena Edlund, Columbia University; and Hongbin Li and Junsen Zhang, Chinese University of Hong Kong, "Long-Term Effects of Chinas Great Famine in Hong Kong and Mainland China"

Discussant: Xiaobo Zhang, International Food Policy Research Institute

Tarun Khanna and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Harvard University, "The Political Economy of Firm Size Distributions: Evidence from Post-Reform China"

Discussant: Bruce Reynolds, University of Virginia

David Dollar, World Bank, and Shang-jin Wei, "Das (Wasted) Kapital: Firm Ownership and Investment Efficiency in China"

Discussant: Galina Hale, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

Geert Bekaert, Columbia University and NBER; Campbell R. Harvey, Duke University and NBER; and Christian Lundblad, University of North Carolina, "Financial Openness and the Chinese Growth Experience"

Discussant: Zhiwu Chen, Yale University

Chang-Tai Hsieh, University of California, Berkeley, and Peter Klenow, Stanford University and NBER, "Misallocation and Manufacturing TFP in China and India"

Discussant: Lee Branstetter, Carnegie Mellon University and NBER

Yi Qian, Northwestern University, "Pricing and Marketing Impacts of Entry by Counterfeiters and Imitators"

Discussant: Nancy Qian, Brown University

Almond and his co-authors evaluate whether the Great China Famine had negative effects on its survivors. According to the fetal-origins hypothesis, cohorts in utero during the famine should have suffered the greatest long-term damage. Consistent with this hypothesis, the authors finds a broad spectrum of compromised outcomes for cohorts born in 1960 who appear in the 2000 Chinese Census. These effects are greatest for those in rural areas, but extend to those who were born in urban areas. The authors also find that Hong Kong residents who were born in China exhibit inferior health outcomes, including reduced birth weight of children born to parents who themselves were in utero during the famine. Health effects exist among emigrants from mainland China despite the selective effects of emigration, which are generally positive. Moreover, no corresponding damage among cohorts born in Hong Kong, and thereby shielded from the famine, is observed.

Khanna and Oberholzer-Gee study the relationship between firm size...