Journal of Comparative Economics最新文献

We know very little about why the legal status of prostitution varies across countries. Drawing on central arguments in the normative literature on the legal status of prostitution, in which a central argument concerns the sexual and bodily autonomy of women, we ask whether a country's position on the individualism-collectivism affects the legal status of prostitution. We investigate this question using a panel of 61 countries, finding a robust positive relationship between individualism and the legality of prostitution. In the baseline model, a one-standard deviation increase in individualism is associated with a ten percentage point increase in the likelihood that prostitution is legal. This relationship is robust to controls for institutional structure, other dimensions of culture, and measures of women's economic status and historical patriarchy. It is also robust to the use of instrumental variable analysis to address issues of endogeneity and measurement error. Our results also shed light on two additional aspects of the normative debate over legal prostitution. In particular, we find that prostitution is more likely to be legal in countries in which women enjoy greater economic status, but we fail to find a consistent empirical relationship between historical patriarchy and legal prostitution.

This paper employs a novel game-theory model to characterize the impact and the resulting welfare implications of a corrupt relationship in the marketization process in an economy with weak institutions. This relationship between a bureaucrat and a domestic firm enables the bureaucrat to share part of the domestic firm’s gain generated by the bureaucrat’s imposition of barriers to deter the entry of foreign firms. When the barrier has an upper bound and both the bureaucrat and the foreign firm have sufficient knowledge regarding the domestic firm’s cost information, the equilibrium level of the barrier would first equal the upper bound and then decrease with the domestic firm’s cost. This result is robust regardless of whether the cost of the domestic firm and the foreign firm are positively correlated or independent. The welfare loss is largest in industries where a firm’s cost relies heavily on its private advantage: e.g., innovation-intensive industries, and when the domestic firm has a relatively large cost disadvantage. This paper provides novel and insightful implications for marketization in countries with weak institutions.

There is growing interest in exploring the use of information and communication technology (ICT) to enhance academic performance. Whereas previous studies have predominantly focused on the direct effects of ICT on education quality, only limited attention has been paid to the interactions between teachers’ use of ICT in the classroom and the students’ use of ICT at home and the role of teachers in the pedagogical process. In this study, we use a nationally representative survey of secondary school students in China to investigate the impact of teachers’ integration of ICT into the instructional process and the impact of the interactions between home ICT resources and school ICT use on students’ academic performance. Our findings indicate that teachers’ increased frequency of ICT use during instruction improves the current and long-term academic performance of students who lack access to computers at home, compared with those with home computers. These positive effects can be attributed to improvements in the quality and preparation time of teachers’ lessons, increased use of interactive teaching methods, and heightened student motivation to learn.

Natural disasters can disrupt our social fabric and increase political polarization by differentially impacting different subpopulations and exacerbating existing inequities. In this paper, we examine the effects of natural disasters on the divergence of social behavior between immigrants and natives in the United States. First, using individual-level time diary data from 2003–2021, we document that first generation immigrants socialize less, volunteer less, and spend more time in religious activities relative to their native counterparts. Second, we make use of temporal and spatial variation in disaster-induced fatalities to examine the relationship between major disasters and time allocation for different social behavioral outcomes. We find that major disasters affect the social lives of both immigrants and natives, but the effects are significantly more pronounced for immigrants. Finally, we show that immigrants respond to disasters by making significant adjustments in their labor market participation both on the intensive and extensive margins, whereas the effects are milder for natives. Our results further suggest that immigrants face higher levels of barriers to out-migrate following a disaster compared to native counterparts, resulting in disruption of social networks.

China promulgated the Compulsory Education Law in 1986, which was subsequently gradually implemented in various provinces. While promoting the development of education in China, whether the implementation of the Compulsory Education Law also has an impact on the fertility rate is an important aspect of understanding the fertility problem in China. This paper examines the marginal treatment effect of education on fertility by using the sampling data of 1 % national population sample survey data in 2015. The empirical study finds that the effect of education on fertility was heterogeneous. For women who face greater difficulties in completing junior high school, education has a greater negative impact on their childbearing. For women who have more opportunities to complete junior high school, the impact of education on childbearing is not significant. The policy simulation results of this paper show that with the increasing completion rate of nine-year compulsory education, education significantly reduces fertility rates in China. The empirical study in this paper has important policy implications. At present, China's fertility policies have turned to incentive-based policies, and the extensive supports of social policies are more critical for the policy goal of improving fertility level.

We present evidence on the distortions that arise from imperfect regulations compared with market allocation mechanisms. Using a triple difference strategy, we evaluate the effectiveness of the Energy-Saving Generation Dispatch reform in China, which aims to allocate more generating hours to power plants with higher energy efficiency. We find that the new dispatch rule improved resource allocation within provinces compared with the previous equal-share dispatch rule. However, despite these improvements, the reform fell short of its intended goals because of the failure to strictly implement the merit order based on real-time coal consumption rates. We demonstrate how the lack of compensation for losers, technical requirements for grid stability, the existence of multiple goals, and information costs contribute to imperfect regulation.

We examine the impact of export shocks proxied by destination countries’ tariffs on the post middle school enrollment of the rural population in China. We complement the literature by examining the across-region spillover effects of export shocks through initial migration networks. We find that the reduction of export tariffs at both the local and migration-destination prefectures significantly decreases post middle school enrollment of the 16–18 years old cohort, but the latter is stronger. Further analysis suggests that employment in the secondary industry rises significantly with the reduction of export tariffs, which improves job opportunities and thus increases the post middle school dropout rate.

We examine the short- and medium-term impacts of online teaching during COVID-19 on the academic performance of high school freshmen, employing unique data from three high schools of different academic performance levels in Zhejiang Province, China. We find that relative to the cohort not affected by COVID-19 and experiencing no online teaching in their freshman year, online teaching had short-term negative effects on Chinese performance in the high-performing school and math performance in the mid-performing school but no significant effects on other tests and in the low-performing school. The negative effects disappeared eight months after students returned to traditional classroom teaching, and students in the high-performing school indeed experienced a significant positive effect in math performance. Moreover, following online teaching, girls in key classes in the high-performing school performed better in math in both the short and medium term, significantly narrowing the math performance gap with their male classmates, while boys in the low-performing school experienced significant declines in both Chinese and math in the medium term.

The evidence for whether China become more competitive following its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) is mixed. Using recent methods for estimating markups and profit shares, this paper documents that Chinese manufacturing firms on average collected more rents after the accession because the rate of net entry of firms lagged the rapid growth of the domestic market. While the selection on large productive firms drove the rise in the aggregate markups in the United States (De Loecker et al., 2020), these competitive forces played a secondary role in China.