China Economic Quarterly International最新文献

Polluting firms typically relocate to avoid stringent environmental regulations. Based on China's Two Control Zones (TCZ) policy, we examine the impact of environmental regulation on firms' location decisions. The results show that in the upwind TCZ near interprovincial areas, the distance of polluting firms to the border is significantly reduced after environmental regulation is tightened. This finding provides new evidence for the need to strengthen regional joint prevention and control to prevent trans-regional pollution transfer.

The effects of skyscraper development on surrounding firms' innovation in China is assessed in this paper, and empirical results show that skyscraper development significantly promotes the innovation of firms within 1 ​km of skyscrapers. However, such effect only exists around very tall skyscrapers in large cities. This means that skyscraper development in small cities often is unfit for the economic fundamentals of these cities, which may weaken the positive externalities generated by skyscrapers. The mechanism analysis in this paper shows that increased surrounding population density brought by skyscraper development and knowledge sharing between firms surrounding the skyscrapers and other firms in the same city are the main paths through which skyscrapers affect innovation.

Recently, China's Ministry of Education has established a new department to regulate extracurricular tutoring for the purpose of reducing students' excessive academic burden. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that academic competitiveness among students is a key driver of the extracurricular tutoring fever. Using the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS) data, we show that when their competitors attend extracurricular tutoring, students keep up with the actions of competitors, generating the peer effect of extracurricular tutoring. This effect is more pronounced for students with stronger competitive preferences. However, this irrational imitation behavior does not improve students' academic performance.

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.