Journal of Asian Economics最新文献

The traditional notion that inflation is a domestic monetary phenomenon has been challenged by the existence of global inflationary factors that cause inflation comovement patterns. Understanding and estimating such comovement and its drivers is critical for effective policymaking. This study analyzes the temporal pattern and determining factors of inflation comovement of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries, comparing it to other former Eastern Bloc economies that entered the European Union (EU), and to other groups of advanced economies. We use monthly data on 26 countries classified into four groups and examine headline, core, food and utilities inflation from December 2006 to October 2021. We find that inflation comovement increased over the study period for all inflation categories, except food inflation, for all groups of countries, with comovement in CIS countries being the lowest. Moreover, positive changes in global energy prices significantly impact CIS inflation comovement, but not negative changes.

The vigorous development of the digital economy will reshape labour demand, which in turn will affect the workplace choice of migrant workers and then their location. Taking the large-scale and highly-mobile immigrant workers in urban China as the research population, this paper conducted an empirical research on the impact of the digital economy on labour location using the data from the China Labour-force Dynamic Survey (2012–2016). Results show that the more developed a city’s digital economy is, the more immigrants the city can attract and absorb. Analysis of the impact channels shows that the attraction of the digital economy to immigrants stems mainly from entrepreneurial opportunity provision and skill utilization enhancement effects. There is individual heterogeneity in the impact of the digital economy, with low-skilled, rural, or high communication ability migrant workers likely to be positively impacted by the development of the urban digital economy. While local governments are committed to digital technology-driven economic transformation, they should nonetheless promote the training of workers in the new era to achieve a better match between digital development and labour market.

We exploit a staggered reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the late 1990s in China to provide plausibly causal evidence that job insecurity has a first-order impact on fertility. Prior to the reform, unemployment rates were low and job security for SOE workers paralleled that of government employees. Post-reform, numerous SOE employees were laid off and their contracts were no longer permanent, but government employees continued to enjoy high levels of job security. We find that the reform caused SOE employees who retained their positions to delay having their first child by 0.718 years. The spillover effects are sizable: employees in the untargeted private sector delay starting a family by 0.387 years. Despite the importance of family lineage in China at the time, our findings indicate that the fertility response transcended mere birth timing adjustments, and decreased couples’ likelihood of having children. Specifically, the reform initially reduced the number of births by 8.4 % in the short run and had a more pronounced long-term effect on completed fertility at age 45.

Using a sample of Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed enterprises from 2011 to 2020, this study measures listed enterprises’ employee satisfaction according to whether they were included in China’s Top 100 Best Employers (Top 100) list to investigate the impact of employee satisfaction on enterprises’ digital transformation. The study determines that enterprises on the Top 100 list with high employee satisfaction are correlated with driving digital transformation. This conclusion remains valid after considering endogeneity and conducting various robustness tests, supporting the stakeholder theory hypothesis. Mechanism tests demonstrate that employee satisfaction promotes enterprise digital transformation through three mechanism channels of human capital agglomeration, technological innovation, and mitigation of managerial myopia. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that employee satisfaction promotes enterprises’ digital transformation more significantly in non-state-owned enterprises, enterprises with high industry concentration, and those with high research and development intensity. Furthermore, enterprises with higher employee satisfaction exhibit better financial status, which improves innovation efficiency, increases income, and promotes scale expansion.

This study explores whether the policy of reducing labor payments can have opposite effects to those expected. Specifically, it investigates whether reducing the social insurance contribution rate can increase labor employment and enhance overall labor income. This study focuses on a direct social security fee reduction event in China. This event targets labor-intensive enterprises and encourages adopting industrial robots. By leveraging this quasi-natural experiment, we construct a mathematical model. Further, using a triple-difference strategy, we examine the impact of social security fee reduction on firm factor structures and income distribution. This study observes that a social security fee reduction decreases the labor income share of enterprises. However, this only applies to non-small and medium-sized enterprises (non-SMEs) and is not observed in SMEs. Consequently, because of the social security fee reduction, automation is the primary cause of the decline in the labor income share. The reduction in social security fees enables companies to use the saved funds for further automation, causing labor productivity to exceed labor costs and ultimately reducing the labor income share. The findings suggest that industrial specialization is one of the reasons for labor income share decline in transitioning economies.

This paper uses panel local projection methodology to analyze Gross Regional Domestic Product (GRDP) and employment responses to external shocks, including US monetary policy, oil price, and geopolitical risk shocks. Our main findings are that the effects of US monetary policy and oil price shocks manifest with a lag of one to two years, while the impact of geopolitical risk shocks is estimated to occur immediately and dissipate rapidly. The factors behind heterogeneity in regional economic responses to external shocks were identified as income levels, industrial and demographic structures, household indebtedness, and global integration. These findings suggest that external shocks can exert heterogeneous effects depending on the nature of each region, primarily influenced by their industrial structure and economic vulnerability.

The paper models the effect of distortion in factor markets on corporate innovation in a developing country, where the factor markets are underdeveloped in contrast to product markets. The distortion between factor markets and product markets has deteriorated the capability of firms to obtain profits, thereby dampening the incentives of firms to invest in innovation. Using a detailed firm-level dataset with manufacturing corporate innovation activities from 2008 to 2014, we testify to the prediction from the theoretical models that distortion depresses corporate R&D investment as well as R&D per capita. We strengthen our results using an IV approach to address reverse causality. Overall, our results have shed light on an emerging literature on distortion and innovation.

This paper explores the linkages between urban form and productivity in Chinese prefecture-level cities from 2000 to 2019. While most of the literature has concentrated on the effects of population density, this paper calculates the distance between each raster pair within the city's largest continuous built-up area to capture the urban form variation by using the matched data of the European Space Agency Global Land Cover dataset and the Chinese administrative map. For the empirical evidence, we apply the instrumental variables strategy for dealing with the endogeneity between urban form and productivity. We find that urban form deterioration has a statistically significant negative effect on the city's total factor productivity, and the results are still robust with a series of robustness checks. Furthermore, according to the mechanism test, we find that urban form deterioration affects the city's economic performance by discouraging the aggregation of enterprises and population in the city. This study thus sheds new light on the adoption of urban expansion policies to solve the negative externality of urban form deterioration on economic performance in China.

Green technology acquisition solves the mismatch of innovation elements through transactions and realizes the rapid and reasonable allocation of green patents among enterprises with different technology levels. However, whether green technology acquisition can effectively reduce carbon emissions has not yet received the attention it deserves. Based on data of 153 Chinese cities from 2011 to 2019, this paper explores the impact direction and mechanism of green technology acquisition on non-residential CO2 emissions, and analyzes the moderating role of government actions in this process. The study finds that: (1) Green technology acquisition in China has formed a multi-core spatial distribution pattern based on urban agglomerations, among which the Yangtze River Delta, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Pearl River Delta urban agglomerations constitute the main agglomeration areas for green technology acquisition. (2) Green technology acquisition can significantly reduce non-residential CO2 emissions, which is mainly achieved through the cleaner production effect and R&D innovation effect. (3) In terms of government actions, low-carbon advocacy can effectively moderate the mediating role of the cleaner production effect between green technology acquisition and non-residential CO2 emissions, and environmental incentives and environmental penalties can effectively moderate the mediating role of the R&D innovation effect between green technology acquisition and non-residential CO2 emissions, but the moderating paths are different. (4) There is a threshold effect of intellectual property protection in the impact of green technology acquisition on non-residential CO2 emissions. Only when the degree of intellectual property protection exceeds a certain threshold, green technology acquisition can effectively reduce non-residential CO2 emissions. This paper not only explains the key value of green technology for low-carbon development from the perspective of knowledge flow, but also provides a theoretical reference for the rational matching of government actions under the carbon neutrality target.

This paper empirically investigates the impact of the property tax on housing wealth inequality using the property tax pilot program in China as a quasi-natural experiment. Our findings uncover a significant decrease in the Gini coefficients of the housing wealth in the pilot cities. The main channels at work include evolutionary housing demand from home buyers and the convergence of housing prices for different sizes. Two typical tax-exemption scenarios, based on per capita housing area or total number of housing units, present significant differences in the magnitude of the policy effectiveness as well as the effective channels.