China Economic Quarterly International最新文献

Based on the resource-based view, this paper attempts to analyze the impact of international related-party trade on the performance of foreign-funded enterprises in China from the perspective of value creation. The findings of this paper are as follows. (1) the greater the proportion of parent company to foreign-funded enterprises’ international related-party transactions, the better the performance of foreign-funded enterprises. (2) As the differences in legal systems increase, the role of international related-party trade in promoting performance is weakening. (3) As cultural differences increase, the role of international related-party trade in promoting performance is increasing. After considering the impact of transfer pricing, the conclusions of this paper remain unchanged.

Using the Chinese Agriculture Technology Demonstration Center (ATDC) in Africa as a quasi-natural experiment, we examine the causal impacts of China’s aid on crop production in Africa. The data pertain to African country-by-crop panel data from 2000 to 2018. Leveraging the triple difference-in-differences method, we find that the ATDC leads to increased crop production and improved trade dependence. The positive effects are more pronounced for free-standing technical support and ATDCs operated by state-owned enterprises. Lastly, the ATDC has profound implications for local agriculture and rural development.

Using the data of listed companies and the DID method, this paper reveals three ways in which green credit policy (GCP) affects corporate debt financing. By controlling credit input, GCP can effectively restrain corporate debt financing in the “two-high” industries. However, the policy also leads to the environmental performance effect and bank credit discrimination effect, as it strengthens the impact of environmental performance on corporate debt financing and weakens banks’ credit discrimination. Under the combined effect of the three ways, GCP has restrained the borrowing growth of state-owned enterprises, but has no significant impact on private firms.

This study investigates the spatial dynamics of intellectual property (IP) protection in China, a topic garnering significant attention both domestically and internationally amid the country's innovation-driven development and emphasis on IP strategies. Utilizing panel data from 284 prefecture-level cities from 2005 to 2021, the spatial Durbin model is employed to analyze the spatial correlation and determinants of IP protection. Findings reveal a notable positive spatial dependence and spillover effects of IP protection. The spatial dependence is more pronounced between geographically adjacent cities than those with close economic ties. Moreover, patent output and the presence of national IP demonstration cities significantly bolster IP protection levels, underscoring the importance of both quality and a balanced quantity of patents. The impact of these factors varies with regional and urban scale heterogeneity, with more pronounced effects in eastern and larger cities. This research underscores the positive spatial effects of IP protection and its role in enhancing regional innovation capabilities, fostering high-quality economic development, and supporting innovation-driven strategies, offering valuable theoretical and practical insights.

The Chinese government implemented the universal two-child policy on January 1, 2016 to arrest the decline in the nation's birthrate and address the challenge of a rapidly aging population. We find that this policy significantly increased the possibility of having children and this effect was not attenuated from 2016 to 2018. This policy can explain 14.8% of the average number of newborns in 2016–2018. Our back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the three-child policy implemented in 2021 will bring additional 283.2 thousand newborns each year.

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.