International Studies of Economics最新文献

Green innovation meets the simultaneous demands of green and innovation-driven development models when it is deemed as a key to realizing a green economic transition. However, factor market distortion impedes China's green development through factor mobility and resource allocation. Under such circumstances, we detect whether and how factor market distortion affects green innovation from various perspectives in the case study of China's Sustainable Development Demonstration Belt. The findings demonstrate that the distortion has a pronounced inhibiting effect on the green innovation growth in the study area. For the eastern and more-developed cities, factor market distortion considerably inhibits green innovation improvement, while the impact is less pronounced in the western (or central) and less developed cities. Furthermore, the factor market distortion negatively affects green innovation through some effective paths, like energy efficiency and environmental regulation. From a spatial perspective, the green innovation's spillover effect could be reduced by both the distortions of the labor market and capital market. Thus, this study would provide strong theoretical support for enhancing the factor market system and improving the multiregional green innovation power in China, as well as scientific suggestions on transitioning to China's sustainable development.

This paper examines households' stock market participation responses to a critical life-cycle event, adult children's marriage. An event-study difference-in-differences approach is employed to facilitate identification, which compares changes in the stock market participation behaviors of households that experience children's marriage with households that experience it later as well as households that never experience it. Exploiting household-wide variations in exposure to children's marriage using the China Family Panel Studies data over the 2010–2020 period, this paper finds that 2 years after children's marriage, households significantly enhance their likelihood of participating in the stock market. Households' willingness to participate increases by 1.1 to 1.6 percentage points depending on specifications. This paper's finding supports time-varying risk aversion at the household level. Mechanism analysis indicates that children's marriage raises household risk preferences because it mitigates parental old-age support concerns and alleviates households' consumption commitment to housing and children.

Whether command-control environmental regulation can play a positive role in circumstances of imperfect market incentive-based environmental regulation remains rarely explored. Using the difference-in-difference model, we find that command-control environmental regulation can significantly improve the environmental performance of heavily polluting firms. This result still holds after a sequence of robustness tests. The analysis of the economic mechanism indicates that the new environmental protection law mainly contributes positively to the environmental performance of high-polluting firms by improving the quality of their environmental investments and pollution treatment disclosures, and by reducing the government subsidies they receive to improve the environmental performance of high-polluting firms. Meanwhile, the new environmental protection law has a more pronounced impact on heavily polluting enterprises in the eastern region, with imperfect internal control, stronger environmental regulations, more distant political connections, greater pressure on regional GDP growth and weaker industry competition. This paper confirms the effectiveness of the new environmental law in improving environmental performance of heavily polluting enterprises in pursuit of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, and provides new evidence to test the weak Porter hypothesis in the context of transition economies.

The bride price, as an informal institution originated from traditional culture, is pervasive in many areas of the developing world in a form of a payment from the family of the groom to that of the bride at marriage. We study the effects of bride price on parents' health in China. Using information on bride price payment and various health measures from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, we find that the bride price significantly reduces self-reported health among the grooms' parents after addressing the endogeneity issue with average sex ratio within a family computed as an instrumental variable. The reductions are heterogenous across urban and rural areas. Mechanism analysis suggests the negative health outcomes are driven by family debt, heavier psychological stress and longer work hours caused by bride price payments.

In this study, we investigate the tail dependency between bank stocks in China and 35 common risk factors. We measure univariate and multivariate conditional tail risk probabilities. The evidence indicates that tail events from risk factors in the banking, security trading, real estate, and energy industries have the largest effects on the realization of extreme returns from Chinese bank stocks. The univariate conditional tail risk is considerably higher than the unconditional tail risk. The impact of multiple tail events from several risk factors occurring simultaneously is much stronger than tail events from one single risk factor. In general, there is a stronger cross-market tail linkage between emerging market risk factors and bank stocks in China when compared with developed market risk factors. However, the cross-market tail linkage between developed market risk factors and bank stocks in China rose sharply during the 2008 financial crisis.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance is crucial for companies to attain sustainable development, which is a key reference for assessing the value and growth potential of a company. Government subsidies can provide incentives for companies to prioritize environmental preservation, meet their social duties, and improve their governance performance. This paper empirically examines the effects and mechanisms of government subsidies on corporate ESG performance, using an Ologit multiple ordered regression model based on data from Chinese listed companies. We find that not only do total government subsidies significantly improve firms' ESG performance, but both environmental and non-environmental subsidies also have the similar effect, albeit with different impact mechanisms. The analysis of the mechanism suggests that government subsidies can enhance corporate ESG performance by promoting green innovation, alleviating financing constraints, increasing charitable donations, and attracting social attention. This paper holds significant practical value as it presents empirical findings as a basis for reforming China's subsidy policies, showcasing the actual impact of diverse subsidy policies and the heterogeneity.

This study employs China's Yangtze River Economic Belt strategy as a quasi-natural experiment to investigate the impact of prioritizing green development on economic growth. Our empirical findings show that the strategy significantly reduces urban industrial wastewater discharge. It helps transition the region's industries towards technology-driven service sectors while maintaining a steady economic growth rate. On average, cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt see a 21.9% decrease in annual industrial wastewater discharge, a 1.9% increase in economic growth rate, a 4.9% rise in the proportion of service industries' contribution to GDP, and a 2.4% increase in the number of employees in productive service industries. Moreover, our empirical results highlight the heterogeneity in the effects of the strategy across different regions, which can be attributed to factors such as population density, infrastructure, levels of human capital, and government governance. The implementation of the Yangtze River Economic Belt strategy offers valuable insights for developing countries on how to balance between economic development and environmental protection.

Relationship between health and the macroeconomy has received increasing attention in practice. National health is not only a key measure of macroeconomic development in the United Nations Human Development Index, its interaction with macroeconomic development is also at the core of the World Health Organization Commission on Macroeconomics and Health. The macroeconomic causes and implications of rising health-care expenditures have frequently made to headline news. According to recent polls from Gallup, this issue tops America's “most important problem” list. The US Congressional Budget Office has placed it at the center of the sustainability issue concerning the nation's fiscal system going forward. As Alan Blinder (i.e., Blinder, 2013) puts it: “If we can somehow solve the health care cost problem, we will also solve the long-run deficit problem. But if we can't control health care costs, the long-run deficit problem is insoluble. Simple, right? Impossible? We'd better hope not.”

In recent years, the academic literature has also paid increasing attention to the related issues. Not surprisingly, a growing literature focuses on understanding the rising health spending and longevity (e.g., Fonseca et al., 2021, Hall & Jones, 2007, Zhao, 2014). Recent studies also explain why health spending is higher even though life expectancy is lower in the United States than in Europe (e.g., He et al., 2021), and why, on the one hand, there is a positive relation between health and long-run growth while, on the other hand, for industrialized economies, national health status tends to be negatively correlated with macroeconomic performance in the short run, improving in recessions and worsening in booms, though health spending generally declines during contractions and rises during expansions (e.g., He et al., 2023). Incidentally, the implications of health for social welfare play a central role in the recent macrohealth literature (e.g., Hall & Jones, 2007, Jones & Klenow, 2016, Murphy & Topel, 2006). Increasing attention has also been paid to understanding the implications of health risks for consumption, health spending, and allocation of wealth among bonds, stocks, and housing (e.g., Finkelstein et al., 2013, Yogo, 2016), and the trade- offs of provision of health-related social insurance on risk-sharing against dynamic disincentive (moral hazard) effect of health investment (e.g., Cole et al., 2019), and to linking health and the labor market (e.g., Fang & Gavazza, 2011, Feng & Zhao, 2018, Hosseini et al., 2021, Huang & Huffman, 2014). Recent academic investigations have also started to explore the role of health as a special type of human capital, in complementing or substituting the other types of capital, such a

This paper examines the impact of the social norm of intergenerational support to aging parents on fertility decisions in developing economies. The traditional expectation of receiving support from adult children in old age has historically been a significant factor in the decision to have children, especially in developing countries. The study develops a life cycle model that endogenizes fertility choices and incorporates the expectation of transfers from children based on the filial responsibility norm. We utilize household survey data from Indonesia to estimate earnings profiles and uncertainties over the life cycle, and to estimate the transfers from adult children to parents to indicate the current strength of the norm in 2000s. We conducted counterfactual experiments to explore the impact of the filial responsibility norm on fertility and found that a weakening of the norm could account for a significant proportion of the decline in the total fertility rate.