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Dr. Haoming Liu

This year’s Kuznets Prize has been awarded to Dr. Haoming Liu (National University of Singapore) for his paper “The quality–quantity trade-off: evidence from the relaxation of China’s one-child policy,” Journal of Population Economics (2014), 27(2), pp. 565–602. The prize honors the best article published in the Journal of Population Economics in 2014.

Biographical abstract

Dr. Haoming Liu is an Associate Professor of Economics at the National University of Singapore. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and focuses on the research areas of labor and demographic economics, health, education, and welfare, as well as economic development and technological change and growth. In addition to his professional experience at the National University of Singapore, he has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of New South Wales, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Michigan, and a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario. During his career, he earned numerous grants and published articles in prestigious journals such as the Journal of Labor Economics and the Journal of Monetary Economics.

Abstract of the winning paper

This paper uses the exogenous variation in fertility introduced by China’s family planning policies to identify the impact of child quantity on child quality. We find that the number of children has a significant negative effect on child height, which supports the quality–quantity trade-off theory. Our instrumental quantile regression approach shows that the impact varies considerably across the height distribution, particularly for boys. However, the trade-off is much weaker if quality is measured by educational attainments, suggesting that the measurement of child quality is also crucial in testing the quality–quantity trade-off theory.