China Economic Quarterly International最新文献

We study the effects of bike-sharing usage on urban air quality in China. Our Difference-in-Differences strategy exploits the staggered entries by two leading bike-sharing companies, ofo and Mobike, and utilizes city-day panel data. We find that the entries of the two bike-sharing platforms can reduce PM_2.5 by 3.832 ​μg/m³. Further analyses imply that the effects are more conspicuous on pollutants from the exhaust emission of vehicles, increase with the usage intensity of bike-sharing service, and are more pronounced in cities with well-developed rail transit or those located in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Air Pollution Transmission Channel.

This paper examines the impact of the tariff increase implemented by the U.S. in 2018 on Chinese firms' export and subsequent employment adjustment. Under the influence of front run shipment and expected stock pile, the export volume increased by 10% after the tariff increase in 2018. While firm employment remains stable, the average working hour and wage increased. In 2019, with the impact of tariff increase gradually emerging, the export volume declined significantly. However, Chinese exporter did not cut jobs on a large scale. Instead, they reduced the per capita working hour and other employment costs, leading to a simultaneous decline in wage and non-cash benefits. The latter contributes to more than 42% of the decline. Our study indicates that the impact of tariff on employment is mainly reflected in the intensive rather than extensive margin.

How to effectively reduce the burden of students has received widespread attention in recent years. A series of burden reduction policies have been issued, yet there exists large dispute over the effectiveness of these policies. To assess the impact of the burden reduction policies, we construct a theoretical model and test its hypotheses with the constructed policy index and micro-level information from the CFPS dataset. We find that the burden reduction policies implemented during 2005–2018 were generally ineffective, but enlarged the difference in both family education investments and education output between students from high and low income families.

Using the difference-in-differences method, we examine the impact of environmental regulation on individual health, employment, income, and welfare. We find that environmental regulation significantly improves health, but reduces employment and wage levels, although the effect on income is not statistically significant. The impact of environmental regulation is heterogeneous at different stages of economic development, and the high-age and the less educated are the main gainers and bearers of health benefits and economic costs. The welfare effect suggests that the welfare gains from improved health due to environmental regulation effectively compensate for the welfare losses from reduced employment.

We construct a global financial inclusion index using data from the World Bank, IMF, and V-Lab and propose an inverted U-shaped relationship between financial inclusion and financial stability. The empirical evidence supports our hypotheses, and the impact of financial inclusion on financial stability is less prominent under strong regulation and supervision. In addition, we use our constructed financial inclusion index, capital adequacy ratio, market power, and macroeconomic variables to simulate and predict the financial crisis. Our research has important policy implications and provides valuable insights to financial regulatory authorities in making decisions related to financial inclusion and financial stability.

With rising wages and increasing maturity of computer technology, computer use in the workplace is becoming increasingly common. Based on data from an urban labor survey, 58 percent of urban workers used computers at work in 2016. Using computer price and density as instrumental variables, we identify the estimation bias from the simultaneous determination of computer use and its productivity effect. We further identify the productivity effect based on computer use frequency. With the above econometric issues taken into account, computer use at work significantly boosts labor productivity and increases workers' wage returns by 48.4 percent.

In this paper, we collect the annual data of 145 commercial banks in China from 2010 to 2019 and use a panel data fixed-effect model to study how fintech (financial technology) affects the influence of macroeconomic uncertainty on commercial banks' proactive risk-taking. We find that the development of fintech mitigates the dampening effect of macroeconomic uncertainty on commercial banks' proactive risk-taking. Specifically, fintech plays a mitigating role by motivating commercial banks to issue loans and hold transactional financial assets. With the increase of commercial banks’ proactive risk-taking, the mitigation effect of fintech monotonically diminishes. This mitigating effect is heterogeneous across different types of commercial banks, as it is relatively weak for banks with high capital adequacy ratios and large state-owned banks.

How will the outbreak of Covid-19 affect people's expectations on the macroeconomy? We conduct an online experiment in China to investigate the relationship between ambiguity aversion, risk aversion, and expectations about the macroeconomy after the onset of Covid-19 which can be considered an uncertainty shock. Our study differs from previous studies as we elicit individuals' preferences in terms of ambiguity aversion and risk aversion, and test how these preferences drive macroeconomic expectations. We find that ambiguity averse subjects are more pessimistic about the effect of Covid-19 on the economic growth rate. Ambiguity averse subjects are more likely to reduce consumption and expect lower savings in response to the outbreak. More risk taking subjects have more optimistic expectations on the macroeconomy, and they are less likely to reduce consumption, investment, and savings.

This research uses CHIP(China Household Income Project) data of 2018 to examine the impact of higher education opportunities on the middle school graduates’ choice between academic and vocational high schools. The findings indicate that a higher university quota at the provincial level increases the likelihood of middle school graduates choosing an academic high school, and the probability of choosing a vocational high school is negatively correlated with elite university opportunities in urban China. These results suggest that spatial differences in opportunities of higher education significantly influence the type of human capital investment at the high school stage in China.