The winners of the 10th “Zhang Peigang Development Economics Award for Outstanding Achievements” were recently announced. Dr LI Wenchao, a researcher in the Department of Economics and Finance at Tongji SEM, won the award for her paper entitled “Multidimensional Premarital Investments with Imperfect Commitment”. This is the second consecutive win for Tongji SEM after Professor CHENG Mingwang. Dr. LI Wenchao specialises in the research fields of development economics and labour economics, balancing national needs with academic frontiers in his explorations. Focusing on significant economic and social phenomena in China’s development process, she integrates classical economic theories with cutting-edge perspectives to distill research questions of scientific value, thereby advancing the academic frontier of economics.

The “Zhang Peigang Development Economics Award for Outstanding Achievements”, initiated by the Zhang Peigang Development Economics Research Foundation, aims to promote research and dissemination in the field of development economics to the world. The prize is awarded biennially for significant results (including monographs and articles) and researchers in the field of development economics, in the context of the ongoing exploration of theories of how to achieve effective industrialization in China and in other developing countries.

Introduction to the Award-Winning Paper:

Multidimensional Premarital Investments with Imperfect Commitment

Based on the theoretical frontiers of marriage market matching and investment in economics, the paper focuses on the hot social issue of gender ratio imbalance in China’s transition and development, and provides a theoretical framework for analyzing premarital investment under incomplete marital commitment from the perspective of multidimensional investment.

Main Contributions of the Paper:

1. A new theoretical framework for analyzing premarital investment under incomplete marital commitment is constructed, which promotes the latest development of marriage matching and investment theory in economics;
2. The theoretical framework of the thesis fits well with the actual characteristics and laws of China’s marriage market, and provides a new theoretical foundation for understanding and explaining marriage matching and investment in China’s development process;
3. The study reveals the close relationship between the marriage market and investment, which provides an important reference for the stability of the marriage market, the rational allocation of family resources, and the formulation and implementation of fertility decisions in developing countries.