Journal of Comparative Economics最新文献

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.

What are the origins of national identity? We investigate the success of propaganda as one the first nation-building policies conducted in the German lands around 1815. To elicit identity changes at the level of individuals we use data on first names across German cities and villages. To validate the approach of using first names, we show that soldiers with national names had a higher likelihood to be honored for bravery during the German-French War. Exploiting unanticipated border changes together with variation within the same families over time, i.e., family fixed effects, we find that parents in treated cities responded by choosing national (rather than ruler) first names for their children. We do not find a corresponding increase in villages suggesting that national identity was more prevalent among the urban population, in particular the elite, during this period.

Can transparency interventions reduce corrupt behavior when corrupt actors are politically influential and the victims of corrupt acts confront large obstacles to collective action? These conditions describe the pervasive phenomenon of grand corruption and potentially render corrupt actors less vulnerable to transparency interventions. We present the first evidence that, despite these theoretical obstacles, a transparency intervention in the Colombian School Meals Program significantly changed the behavior of powerful operators. The intervention consisted of informal audits and text messages to parents. It affected behavior through two channels. A survey of parents reveals greater bottom-up mobilization to oversee operators in treated schools; the pattern of operator responses to the informal audits over time and across departments indicates that operators were concerned that systematic evidence of corrupt behavior would trigger top-down enforcement actions by high-level enforcement agencies.

Survival cannibalism persisted across human societies until recently. What drove the decline in cannibalism and other forms of violence? Using data from the 1470–1910 period, this paper documents that in historical China, the Confucian clan—an institutionalized kinship network—acted as an informal internal market to facilitate intra-clan resource pooling and risk-sharing, thus reducing the need for cannibalism during times of drought-related famine. The risk mitigation role of the clan remains robust after controlling for economic development and other factors and ruling out alternative channels. Thus, kinship networks and their associated culture contributed to human civilizational development before the advent of formal markets.

Symbiotic corruption occurs when senior officials employ the symbiotic relationship with junior officials in corrupt activities, to induce them to participate in the political contest for power and political rents. This paper develops a formal theoretical model to analyze the mechanics and consequences of symbiotic corruption prevailing in weakly institutionalized societies. We find that in the presence of symbiotic corruption, political contests tend to arise when the initial distribution of political rents between rival factions is disproportional to their de facto political power. Anti-corruption by increasing the effective penalty or enhancing monitoring of corruption works differently, but both are surprisingly ineffective in a society plagued by symbiotic corruption. In an unbalanced political system, where the initial distribution of political rents is relatively disproportional, an increase in the effective penalty induces rival factions to reach a tacit collusion to maintain peace and leads to universal symbiotic corruption; a rise in monitoring efficiency decreases total corruption but inevitably increases symbiotic corruption. In a balanced political system, universal corruption always emerges, and anti-corruption only affects the transformation between symbiotic and individual corruptions. This study not only sheds light on the (in)effectiveness of conventional anticorruption measures in the presence of symbiotic corruption, but also provides a new perspective on the link between bureaucratic hierarchies, national-level power dynamics, and corruption.