International Studies of Economics最新文献

I conduct an exploratory study about the feasibility of factor timing in the Chinese stock market, covering 24 representative and well-identified risk factors in 10 categories from the literature. The long–short portfolio of short-term reversal exhibits strong out-of-sample predictability, which is robust across various models and all types of predictors. This predictability is significant both statistically and economically, with a simple investment strategy obtaining its return three times higher than the buy-and-hold return in the sample period and a significant annualized 20.4% CH-3 alpha. Portfolio historical volatility and market volatility measurement predictors play crucial roles in the reversal factor premium's robust predictability. However, such results are not evident in predicting all other factors' long–short portfolios as well as all factors' long-wing and short-wing portfolios, and this failure cannot be attributed to their exposure to unpredictable market returns.

This study aims to determine the most important component of economic freedom and to rank the performance of countries using multiple criteria decision-making tools within the context of fuzzy set theory. To do so, we utilize a combination of fuzzy entropy weighting and fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) methods to assess the economic freedom performance of 122 countries for the period 2000–2020. The findings suggest that the stability and reliability of a country's monetary system is the most crucial attribute for economic freedom performance. This implies that a stable and reliable monetary system is considered a fundamental aspect of economic freedom. Based on the TOPSIS analysis, the top 10 best-performing countries/regions in terms of economic freedom are Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Denmark, and Ireland. On the other hand, Venezuela, Myanmar, Congo Republic, Algeria, Syrian Arab Republic, Congo Democratic Republic, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, Chad, and Iran are the worst-performing countries.

The empirical literature comparing the innovation performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms in China often yields conflicting results. To shed new light on this debate, we construct an extensive dataset by linking the Annual Survey of Industrial Enterprises (ASIE) dataset with patent quality data. Our analysis focuses on the impact of privatization on the innovation performance of former SOEs. Our findings suggest that the privatization of SOEs generally results in a decrease in innovation performance. This adverse effect is particularly pronounced for firms situated in regions characterized by low levels of market development or those grappling with high financial constraints. This supports the hypothesis that SOEs can serve as a mechanism to address institutional deficiencies in China's context. Our study contributes to a deeper understanding of the relative innovation performance of SOEs and private enterprises and has significant policy implications for ongoing SOE reforms in China and other developing countries.

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.