This impressive study and analysis by Dr. Minghao Li and Dr. Wendong Zhang, entitled "Finding Firmer Ground" adds a significant analytical element to the effort to enhance the Sino - American relationship through increased “Agricultural Cooperation” here in the Heartland of America, the part of the United States that has such a long and illustrious history of leadership in building connections between the Chinese and American peoples.

The study of intergenerational mobility has a long history in the social sciences. Previous studies have proposed various mobility concepts, striven to overcome empirical barriers to achieve accurate national measures, and mapped out cross-country patterns and time trends of mobility. The three essays in dissertation contribute to a recent strand of this literature which seeks to understand the mechanisms through which social status is transmitted across generations. After an overall introduction in chapter one, chapter two uses recently published county-level data to study the determinants of intergenerational mobility, measured by income levels and teen birth rates. Following Solons mobility model, we study the impacts of public investment in human capital, returns to human capital, and taxation. The results show that better school quality and higher returns to education increase adult incomes and reduce teen birth rates for children from low income families. By comparing counties within or adjacent to metropolitan areas to other counties, this study finds that urban upward mobility is sensitive to parents' education while non-urban upward mobility is sensitive to migration opportunities.Chapter three employs court-ordered School Finance Reforms (SFRs) as quasi-experiments to quantify the effects of education equity on intergenerational mobility within commuting zones. First, I use reduced form difference-in-difference analysis to show that 10 years of exposure to SFRs increases the average college attendance rate by about 5.2% for children with the lowest parent income. The effect of exposure to SFRs decreases with parent income and increases with the duration of exposure. Second, to directly model the causal pathways, I construct a measure for education inequity based on the association between school district education expenditure and median family income. Using exposure to SFRs as the instrumental variable, 2SLS analysis suggests that one standard deviation reduction in education inequality will cause the average college attendance rate to increase by 2.2% for children at the lower end of the parent income spectrum. Placing the magnitudes of these effects in context, I conclude that policies aimed at increasing education equity, such as SFRs, can substantially benefit poor children but they alone are not enough to overcome the high degree of existing inequalities.Chapter four studies the Intergenerational Persistence of Self-employment in China across the Planned Economy Era. It finds that children whose parents were self-employed before Chinas socialist transformation were more likely to become self-employed themselves after the economic reform even though they had no direct exposure to their parents businesses. The effect is found in both urban and rural areas, but only for sons. Furthermore, asset holding data indicate that households with self-employed parents before the socialist transformation were more risk tolerant. These findings suggest that the taste for self-employment is an important conduit of parents effects on self-employment, and that the taste being transferred can be mapped to known entrepreneurial attitudes.

Climate change is amplifying the threat of drought to food security. While drought can cause significant agricultural production loss through both crop yield and acreage, previous studies have mostly overlooked the impacts of drought on crop acres. To address this gap, we study corn and soybean production in U.S. counties from 2001 to 2019, examining drought impacts on planned planting acres, prevented planting, and crop abandonment as climate adaptation responses. Our findings show that 28% (26%) of drought impacts on corn (soybean) production can be attributed to the net effect of farmers' decisions on acres. Moreover, drought affects production throughout the crop year, not solely during the growing season. Specifications that omit pre-planting and planting-season drought underestimate the adverse impacts of growing-season drought on the harvested ratio, yield, and production of corn and soybeans by between 11 and 29 percent. Our findings highlight the role of adaptive behavioral responses in quantifying the extent of climate-related damage in agriculture.

Economic impacts of energy infrastructure incidents have been a focus of attention, especially since the rapid pipeline expansion due to the domestic shale oil and gas boom. While previous studies focus on individual pipeline incidents, we provide the first nationwide assessment of pipeline incidents' impacts on housing prices using data from 864 gas distribution pipeline incidents and 17 million property transactions from 2010 to 2020. A difference-in-differences analysis finds that a pipeline incident decreases housing prices by 4% -- 6% on average. We explore the heterogeneous impacts of incidents with different characteristics. These heterogeneous impacts can potentially explain conflicting results from previous studies.