BFI Partnership

The BFI-China project reactivates the successful Asian Family in Transition initiative, which was headed by Professor Gary Becker and James Heckman. This new initiative encompasses a diverse range of activities, including conferences, workshops (in person and Zoom), as well as in-person visits by faculty and students, to and from China and Chicago. The overarching goal of this initiative is to seed and sustain collaboration and facilitate joint research among scholars at Chicago and in China.

Efforts for this project are coordinated by Professor James Heckman (Director, Center for the Economics of Human Development) and funded by the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. We also have agreements with partner institutions in China: Zhejiang University, Jinan University, Renmin University and City University of Hong Kong, who will contribute funds and resources to a series of workshops, talks, conferences and exchanges.

CEHD maintains a robust portfolio of active research projects in China, made possible through numerous fruitful collaborations and with the support of grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and private foundations, as well as strong institutional support in China. This extensive body of work, as well as the expertise within HCEO’s membership and working paper series, are being leveraged to support and augment this initiative.

This initiative will substantially expand and deepen research on topics important to Asia, and in particular to Chinese policy makers and scholars: fertility, the change in family life, migration, the aging population, skill formation at all ages, inequality, and impacts on social mobility.

This project is currently sponsoring the visits of Dr. Zhe Yang (Liaoning University) and Wei Li (Jinan University), who work alongside Dr. Heckman and other researchers at the CEHD using data from the Mianzhu Longitudinal Study of Child Development to investigate pressing questions in the field. Dr. Yang is investigating the complementarity between parental time and money as inputs in the production of human capital, and Wei Li’s research focuses on the relationship between personality traits and economic preferences.