This dissertation comprises three chapters that examine the outcomes of government policies pertaining to education and anti-corruption measures in contemporary China. The study investigates the impacts of these policies on diverse domains such as the marriage market, innovation activities in higher education, and citizens' political attitude towards the government.

\underline{Chapter 1: The Effects of China's College Expansion on the Marriage Market (with Sai Luo)}

Education policies can have crucial effects on the marriage market. In this chapter, we study the impacts of China's college expansion on the marriage market, with a special focus on its effects on the marriage outcomes of college-educated women and men. The empirical analysis is undergirded by a model featuring educational investment, marriage matching, and reductions in search frictions associated with the expansion. We estimate the effects of the expansion on marriage outcomes by exploiting geographic and birth-cohort variation in exposure to the  expansion. Our analysis shows that, consistently with the predictions of the model, the expansion  increased the marriage probability of college graduates. The  expansion also  increased the probability of college-college matches relative to the counterfactual of random matching and reduced the marriage age gap. Our findings highlight the important role of higher education institutions in shaping the marriage market.    
\underline{Chapter 2:  (Mis)use of Power in the Ivory Tower: Evidence from Deans in Chinese Universities}

\underline{(With Yuyu Chen and Xuan Wang)}

In a hierarchical academic system, power can distort the allocation of research resources and output ownership. We study the role of power in intellectual property acquisition. Using biographical information of deans in elite universities in China, we find that the deanship increases their patent applications by 14\%. Further analysis suggests that the deanship effect is driven by misuse of power rather than ability or research resources. We provide causal evidence by showing that an anti-corruption campaign, which increases the cost of misusing power, contains the deanship effect.  Finally, we find that misusing power distorts resource allocation.

\underline{Chapter 3: Anti-Corruption and Political Trust: Evidence from China (with Weizheng Lai)}

How can anti-corruption campaigns influence political trust in government? We investigate this question through the lens of China's recent anti-corruption campaign, launched in 2013, which has unprecedentedly disclosed many corruption investigations to the public. By analyzing a large individual panel dataset, we show that on average, the campaign has significantly reduced political trust, particularly among groups less informed about corruption before the campaign. We document strong heterogeneity in trust changes, possibly driven by a pro- and anti-government cleavage, as captured by previous unpleasant experiences with the government, pro-government indoctrination, and Confucian norms. Our results fit in a model where polarization is rationalized by differences in priors about the government. We also rule out several alternative explanations for our findings.