China Economic Quarterly International最新文献

Using earthquake as an example, I investigate how risk perception affects household consumption with China Urban Household Survey data and Baidu index dataset. The empirical results show that consumption expenditure per capita drops by 25.2 yuan as the local search index of “earthquake” keyword increases by one standard deviation unit. These findings generally support the precautionary savings hypothesis. I also find media coverage of earthquake-related information drives the rise of the search index and the fall of household consumption. The results suggest that disaster events can seriously distort household consumption behaviors^, and the economic costs of social panic can be even higher than the direct loss of disasters.

The nationwide implementation of the minimum wage system in 1993 was followed by the “Minimum Wage Regulations” in 2004 with an attempt to enhance regulatory stringency of the system. The article constructs a theoretical model to establish testable propositions and conducts empirical analysis using China's Nutrition and Health Survey data to examine the impact of the minimum wage system on enterprise employment decisions. The findings reveal that the increase in the minimum wage has resulted in a shift towards short-term employment forms, and the strengthening of the minimum wage system in 2004 has further amplified this trend.

This paper examines whether increased export opportunity improved the relative demand for skilled labors in China's migrants, and whether such effects further improved their investments in their next generation's education. To answer these questions, by employing the National Migrant Monitoring Data, Manufacturing Enterprise Survey, China Customs Database and China's Population survey data, and using international demand shocks to construct instrumental variables, we find that export opportunities do increase the demand for skilled migrants, their wages and the probability that they bring their school-age children to cities. These results indicate that export opportunities not only increase the demand and return for skilled migrants, but also promote the accumulation of human capital for the next generation.

Increased consumption is a key driving factor for further economic development in China. This study examines the influence of road network density on consumption vitality, using big data and various empirical models. The results show that increasing the road density improves consumption quantity, quality, and diversity. The lower the grade of the road network where density is increased, the higher the consumption vitality. This effect shows a significant center-periphery characteristic. Regarding the mechanism, a higher road connectivity increases consumption vitality through visitor flow, which is more significant on low-grade roads. Moreover, the improvement in consumption vitality is significantly capitalized into local housing prices and rent.

Referring to the newspaper textual analysis method by Baker et al. (2016), this study constructs a monthly Chinese Real Estate Policy Uncertainty (REPU) index from 2001 to 2018. The index increases significantly near the promulgation of major policies. We also conduct evaluation of the index with the vector autoregression (VAR) model, which reveals that the rise of REPU indicates the decline in the growth rate of commodity housing development investment, sales area, and real estate industry added value. The REPU index is helpful to expand the understanding of policy uncertainty, and the accurate measurement of REPU is the basis for further research of its impact on China's real estate market.

Nowadays, digital transformation has become an urgent strategic task for traditional commercial banks. Due to the lack of measurement of banks’ digital transformation, whether digital transformation could enhance the competitiveness of banks is still inconclusive. In this paper, we construct an index system to measure digital transformation of banks from three dimensions: strategy transformation, business transformation and management transformation. Using data from Chinese commercial banks, this paper measures the progress of digital transformation of banks in China. The empirical results show that digital transformation can improve bank performance, reduce the negative impact of new technology entrants, and promote the exit of offline channels.

This paper identifies exogenous monetary policy shocks based on the high frequency transaction data of China's interest rate swap market, and explores the ‘signaling channel’ of monetary policy by investigating the transmission of different monetary policy instruments on economic activities at both the macro and micro level. At the macro level, both the reserve ratio and the 7-day repo rate (R007) affect China's nonfinancial sectors and financial markets through the credit channel, while at the micro level, a rise in credit spread amplifies the impact of reserve ratio and R007 on corporate finance. There exists a signaling channel of monetary policy in China. The transmission and the signaling channel of China's monetary policy exhibit significant heterogeneity among enterprises with different ownerships, leverages and ages.

This study examines the impact of lending facilities on commercial banks’ lending and its underlying mechanism by employing the difference-in-difference method utilizing Chinese banking data. It is found that lending facilities significantly increase the scale of lending by commercial banks through the channel of the eligible collateral, and this effect has increased over time. The findings confirm for the first time that lending facilities in China play a credit promotion role through the channel of the eligible collateral, providing empirical evidence in the Chinese context of the effectiveness on lending facilities and important insights for improving lending facility operations.

In a college admission mechanism, students are often matched with colleges by using a noisy signal of their true abilities (e.g., their exam scores). The matching outcome thus may be imperfect in terms of ex-ante fairness, which suggests matching students with higher ability to better colleges. To achieve ex-ante fairness, we consider constraining student choice over colleges, by designing treatments with different constraint levels under the Boston and Serial Dictatorship mechanisms, with preference submission before or after the exam. Constraining student choice increases the probability of achieving ex-ante fairness under the Boston and Serial Dictatorship mechanisms with preference submission before the exam, compared with unconstrained mechanisms and mechanisms with preference submission after the exam. However, the probability of achieving highly unfair matching is also increased, resulting in a riskier matching outcome. Learning the game or providing students with recommended equilibrium strategies can decrease this risk and further increase ex-ante fairness.

Using the policy of unified management of local courts below the province, we found that the independence of the judiciary can significantly improve the success rate of firms in administrative litigation cases, promoting the corporate fixed assets investment rate. The positive influence of reform of local judicial system on private firms is more significant than that on state-owned enterprises. Mechanism analysis shows that the reform of local judicial system will promote financial development and improve corporate financing, reduce corporate bribery expenditures and promote long-term investment and R&D expenditures, which indicates that deepening judicial system reform can achieve the simultaneous advancement of legal construction and economic construction.