林明仁 Ming-Jen Lin​

We use population-wide administrative health records from Taiwan to estimate intergenerational persistence in health, providing the first estimates for a middle-income country. We measure latent health by applying principal components analysis to a set of indicators for 13 broad ICD categories and quintiles of visits to a general practitioner. We find that the rank–rank slope in health between adult children and their parents is 0.22 which is broadly in line with results from other countries. Maternal transmission is stronger than paternal transmission and sons have higher persistence than daughters. Persistence is also higher at the upper tail of the parent health distribution. Persistence is lower when complete data on outpatient care is unavailable. Health transmission is almost entirely unrelated to household income levels in Taiwan. We also find that there are small geographic differences in absolute health mobility across townships and that these are modestly correlated with area-level income and doctor availability.

A large fraction of people in East Asia are incapable of digesting alcohol because of a genetic deficiency. This study examines whether the variation in alcohol tolerance contributes to inequality in the labor market. We conduct our original surveys in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea with the measurement of respondents' degree of alcohol tolerance by a bio-marker test. We find that alcohol-tolerant men consume significantly more alcohol, but their earnings and hours worked do not differ from those of alcohol-intolerant men. Despite a prevalent view that drinking alcohol is indispensable to establish good relationships with colleagues and business partners, our results suggest that there is no systematic impact of alcohol tolerance on labor market outcomes.

This paper examines the causal effects of textbook content on individuals’ national identity, by exploiting a curriculum reform that introduced a new perspective on Taiwan’s history for students entering junior high school after September 1997. Using a repeated nationally representative survey and a regression discontinuity design, we show that students exposed to the new textbooks were more likely to hold exclusive Taiwanese identity rather than dual identity (i.e. Taiwanese and Chinese). The effect was greater for academic track students and those living in neighborhoods where fewer people identify as Taiwanese. In addition, our results suggest that the new curriculum had little impact on people’s political preferences related to Taiwan independence. Finally, we find that the probability of reporting as Taiwanese among old textbook readers converges with that of people reading new textbooks in the long run since the perspectives of old textbooks are in conflict with the recent social trends.

We construct the pre-tax Distributional National Accounts (DINA) of Taiwan from 1981 to 2017 using survey data. Our DINA individual income series demonstrates a much larger inequality than previous results using tax tabulations and tax units. This difference is mainly due to a change in the unit of observation and the treatment of corporate retained earnings. We find that income inequality was stable in the 1980s and began to rise after the mid-1990s. After 2000, this trend further accelerated. We then estimate the distribution of economic growth. From 1981 to 2001, Taiwan experienced a period of rapid economic growth, with a growth rate of 7.32 percent annually and a fairly equal distribution of growth. From 2001 to 2017, the aggregate growth rate declined to 2.47 percent with a deteriorating distribution of growth. The increasing inequality in income and growth distribution is due to the combination of a worsening capital income distribution and rising retained earnings.

Leading recommender systems may recommend only a small fraction of users on the dating platform since the algorithms often exploit popularity and similarity that reinforce preference homogeneity and assortative mating in the marriage market. We apply a stylized matching model in economics to the existing algorithms to reduce inequality, and we evaluate the proposed method by a large-scale field experiment through a dating app. Experiment results suggest that our recommender reduces inequality, improves predictive accuracy, and leads to substantially more matched couples than other competing algorithms.