Journal of Asian Economics最新文献

The experiences of student life can have lasting impacts on an individual's future outcomes. We take the policy of the Rural Primary School Consolidation Program (RPSCP) in 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment, and comprehensively examine the long-term impact of this policy on students’ migration decisions in the future. We find that the RPSCP policy has a persisting negative impact on rural students’ future migration, with a more pronounced effect among girls and younger students. Mechanism analysis suggests that the RPSCP can hinder the process of human capital accumulation, thereby reducing the likelihood of migration. Further investigation highlights that school consolidation not only affects students' career choices, but also has a profound impact on household registration conversion and settlement intentions in other regions.

This study investigates the relationship between digital financial use and resident’s income inequality based on 2019 CHFS data. We argue that digital finance usage impacts resident’s income inequality both directly and indirectly. To examine the impact of digital financial use on resident’s income inequality and explore transmission mechanisms, including differences across regions, occupations, work types, and education levels, we employ ordinary least squares. Our results reveal that digital payments, digital money management, digital funds, and credit card usage have a positive mitigating effect on resident’s income inequality. Digital financial services have a significant positive impact on resident’s income inequality in southern, northern, coastal, and inland regions. Among purely agricultural farmers, digital payments, digital money management, and credit cards' effects are more pronounced than purely non-agricultural farmers. The use of digital financial also reduces resident’s income inequality among different work types, including institutional, state-owned, self-employed, and private enterprise. Family entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial frequency, and working outside the home are important channels through which digital financial services mitigate resident’s income inequality. Digital payments and credit cards reduce resident’s wage income inequality, while digital money management and digital funds are effective in reducing resident’s property income inequality.

Is there any benefit to reducing emissions for firms? Based on the China Industrial Enterprises Emission and Pollution Database and the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms, this study investigates the impact of firms’ emissions reduction on their tax burden. We find strong and consistent evidence of a significant reduction in the tax burden following a reduction of firms polluting emissions. This effect mainly manifests in large-scale firms, firms whose taxes are collected by the local taxation bureaus (LTB), and firms in regions with stricter environmental regulations. We also find that tax breaks and government subsidies are important pathways to reduce corporate tax burden. Further exploration documents that firms’ bargaining power and local tax enforcement have significantly moderating effects on the relationship between firms’ emissions reduction and their tax burden.

This study examines the earthquakes’ effects on households’ risk-taking. Using the China Household Finance Survey data, local earthquakes are found to have negative, significant and short-term effects on risk-taking, which is measured by the probability of households’ participation in risky financial assets markets and the holding ratio. The possible channels are that earthquakes reduce people’s risk-taking by reinforcing their concerns about financial risks and future uncertainties. Besides, the study hypothetically discusses and empirically excludes investor sentiment explanations. In addition, earthquakes’ effects are more pronounced among households with higher wealth and income, and households with female, well-educated heads. Moreover, further discussions about households’ risk management regarding natural hazards are presented accordingly.

Existing research on the relationship between social trust and enterprise size primarily relies on cross-country analysis, but country-specific studies are still rare, especially for developing countries. Drawing on Fukuyama’s proposition that social trust fosters enterprise expansion, this study empirically investigates the effect of social trust on the size of enterprises in China. We analyze industrial enterprise data from the China Industrial Enterprise Database and manually collected data on blood donations, a proxy for social trust, at the prefecture level. Our findings indicate that regions with higher social trust have both larger enterprises and a greater prevalence of large enterprises than regions with low social trust. This study offers an explanation for the “riddle of the absence of large enterprises in China” by considering the role of social trust and provides an empirical examination of Fukuyama’s proposition in the unique context of China.

Using the Asian Development Bank Multi-Regional Input-Output Tables (ADB-MRIO) and the UIBE GVC Indicators Database, this paper selects the data of 14 manufacturing industries in China from 2007 to 2020, and empirically studies the impact of global value chain restructuring on the product structure of China-EU exports. Research shows that the restructuring of global value chain is conducive to the optimization of China-EU export product structure, and has a stronger effect on high-tech industries. Among them, the labor cost-driven global value chain restructuring is not conducive to the upgrading of China-EU export product structure, while the technological progress-driven global value chain restructuring is helpful to the upgrading of the product structure of China-EU exports. Further research finds that the global value chain restructuring driven by the US trade protection policy is conducive to the upgrading of China-EU export product structure. The research of this paper is helpful for China to strengthen China-EU cooperation and upgrade export trade structure in the new wave of global value chain restructuring. This paper can provide a possible path for China and other developing countries to explore high-quality economic development and provide relevant reference value for policy formulation related to the establishment of long-term trade cooperation with the EU.

Research on the impact of returnees on rural economic development in China is scarce with the increasing number of migrant workers returning to the countryside from Chinese cities. Data from China Labor-force Dynamic Survey (CLDS) of 2014 and 2016 are used in this paper, attempting to discuss this issue from the perspective of the impact of returnees on the employment of the non-migrant labor force based on occupational skill structure. It is found that the higher the proportion of returnees at the county level is, the more non-migrants will shift to non-agricultural areas after controlling for the exogenous factors of returning reason. Stayers are more likely to work in the medium-skilled secondary industry and construction and escape away from the low-skilled service sector. Off-farm job opportunity and peer effect may be two main channels of returnees to influence job structure of non-migrants. This paper provides empirical evidence on the contribution of Chinese returnees to non-agricultural economic development in rural areas.

The existing research on the judicial system as the subject of environmental regulation has largely ignored in the Porter Hypothesis. Using the establishment of the environmental court in China, we construct the time-varying difference-in-differences model and use it to examines the rationality of the Porter Hypothesis. The main findings of this study are as follows: (1) as an effective form of environmental regulation, environmental courts significantly improve the level of enterprises’ green technology innovation, which demonstrates the Porter hypothesis positively in China; (2) the establishment of environmental courts can effectively enhance the quality of green technology innovation, and the effect is more significant amongst non-state enterprises and heavily polluting enterprises; (3) The possible mechanisms for the effect of environmental courts on enterprises’ green technology innovation are further verified, including enhancing the environmental attention from government and green financial support from the market. Through the findings of this study, we are able to uncover the effects of environmental judicature on enterprises’ green technology innovation and provide a practical foundation for the development of environmental judicature specialisation.

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic raised questions about identifying and measuring vulnerabilities in non-financial firms in response to large shocks. Applying natural language processing on quarterly earnings call reports, we construct a firm-specific measure of concern about the pandemic for a set of Indian non-financial firms. Compared to their peers, firms with early concern about the pandemic had worse equity responses after the announcement of a surprise, nationwide lockdown in March 2020. We extract the context of the pandemic-related discussions to disentangle the possible mechanisms. The differential returns can only be explained by higher information uncertainty about the impact of the pandemic and its implications for future cash flows.

Facing the concerns that outward foreign direct investments might hollow out domestic corporate activities, we examine whether cross-border acquisitions by emerging market enterprises (EMEs) improve or damage domestic corporate performances based on the data of 348 Indian firms’ cross-border M&A experiences from 1995 to 2017. We investigate acquirers’ post-M&A performances by nonparametric flexible conditional difference-in-difference (DID) analysis which considers different treatment timing and periods. We find that cross-border acquisitions increase acquiring firms’ domestic sales, total labor costs, and total factor productivity (TFP). In addition, we demonstrate that Indian firms’ cross-border M&As in technology-intensive sectors with merged firms located in OECD countries taking the form of horizontal M&As show better domestic performances. The results implicate that well-tuned outward FDIs via cross-border M&As of emerging economies do not hollow out but complement domestic corporate activities.