中国经济评论最新文献

This paper examines the significant transformation in China's antitrust regulatory framework following the consolidation of its three primary antitrust agencies the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), and the State Administration for Industry & Commerce (SAIC) into the State Administration for Market Supervision (SAMR). Utilizing data from publicly listed firms across various industries, we analyze how firms in highly concentrated industries have adapted to this consolidation, by increasing the R&D investment, patent filing, and total factor productivity (TFP). Our mechanism channel indicates that stricter enforcement actions and fines by SAMR have spurred competition and innovation, with effects that are comparably significant across both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms. The paper contributes to the literature by providing an empirical assessment of the effects of this major restructuring within China's Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) enforcement. Our findings shed light on the broader implications of regulatory consolidations on firm innovation, offering insights into the efficacy of such transformations in antitrust policy.

The central Chinese government has transferred some of the authority to collect local firms' income tax from local tax bureaus (LTBs) to state tax bureaus (STBs) to strengthen its control over local tax sources, resulting in a change in the intensity of tax enforcement of firms. Exploiting this quasi-natural event, we use a regression discontinuity design to examine the association between tax enforcement and energy efficiency. We find that firms whose taxes are collected by LTBs have significantly higher energy efficiency than firms whose taxes are collected by STBs. Further analysis shows that more lenient tax collection by LTBs eases firms' financial constraints and prompts firms to adopt cleaner energy structures and conduct more green innovation activities to improve energy efficiency. Heterogeneity analyses show that the main effects are more pronounced when the local government has a larger fiscal surplus or faces greater environmental pressure and when firms have no foreign business or a poor financial condition.

Safety has been a consistent issue with the rise of transportation network companies (TNCs), especially in China with annual revenue exceeding 1.5 trillion CNY. In this paper, we explore intrinsic factors that can influence the risky behavior of TNC drivers by investigating the link between their economic preference parameters and traffic violations. We measure the economic preferences of 160 full-time drivers on a large Chinese TNC platform and examine their violations over the previous 13 months. We have four major findings. First, more risk-averse drivers have less violations. Second, present bias and patience do not affect drivers' risky behavior except that more patient drivers commit more direction|sign violations, which may have been caused by the higher expectation of the gain from such a violation of patient drivers. Third, reciprocity reduces violations of all types. Drivers' belief of other people's pro-social inclination only affects dangerous violations with long duration, i.e., speeding, in which case they take advantage of other people's attentiveness. And finally, we find no evidence of driver fatigue. These results highlight how the advantage of TNC platforms in managing drivers' incentive can affect the negative externality drivers impose through risky driving behavior, and hence provide policy implications.

This paper investigates the impact of the green credit policy on firms' span of global production stages. We leverage a comprehensive dataset, including customs trade data, industrial firm data, and Chinese Input-Output tables, and employ a difference-in-differences design that accounts for the pollution spillover effect within the production network. Our findings indicate that firms in pollution-intensive industries tend to move downstream in the global production line, accompanied by an expansion in the span of production stages. We present evidence that the broader range of production stages can be attributed to increased firm productivity. The effect is more pronounced for hybrid processing firms, private firms, foreign firms, and those in industries that rely on external finance dependence. Our study provides valuable insights into the impact of green credit policies and sheds light on firms' strategies in the context of green development.

The prevailing literature posits a linear relationship between urbanization and food security. Using a policy in China that promotes government-led urbanization through creating cities, specifically city–county merger, we show the existence of a non-linear relationship. Based on the time-dynamic results obtained using national county-level panel data from 2000 to 2020, a potential non-linear characteristic of both decreasing and increasing trends before eventually dissipating has been identified. Mechanism analysis demonstrates that the city–county merger negatively impacts food security by causing labor mobility and cultivated land factor loss. However, the policy's integration of regional markets fosters quality and efficiency improvement in agriculture. The effects of amplified resource pressure and efficiency gains have opposing impacts that vary over time, ultimately resulting in a non-linear relationship. These insights into the debate on urbanization and food security have important policy implications for regions worldwide that are experiencing rapid urbanization, particularly for developing countries.

This study investigates the long-term efficiency of the long-run end-number license plate driving restriction in China, a traffic control policy that is partially aimed at reducing urban air pollution. A difference-in-differences regression is performed on a panel including nine cities that implemented this policy in staggered manner between 2008 and 2013. The results show that overall, this driving restriction does not improve air pollution in policy cities over the long-term. Quantitatively, the city-level air quality index has close-zero statistically insignificant changes by the policy, reaching only 3.9% reduction by 95% confidence interval lower bound of the estimate, translating to welfare gains of only 11.24 USD (70.62 CNY) per person per year, or 0.447 life years per capita. Further analysis with regression discontinuity in time and heterogeneity subgroup analysis illustrates that air pollution may first decrease due to the policy but then bounce back because of the behavioral adaptations of drivers purchasing a second car in cities without simultaneous car purchase restrictions. This shows that need to combine the end-number license plate policy with car purchase restrictions or electric vehicle promotions to achieve effective air pollution reductions over the long-term.

China has extended maternity leave to encourage childbirth. This study specifically investigates the effects of China's maternity leave reform (MLR) on women's labor supply, utilizing a difference-in-difference analysis with data from the China Family Panel Studies. Our findings show that MLR leads to a notable decrease in women's working hours, with an average reduction of 2.6 h per week. However, no corresponding impacts are observed in men's labor supply. Mechanism analysis suggests that these effects may stem from women facing more disadvantaged positions in the labor market, having increased intentions for fertility, and experiencing heightened household responsibilities. These findings hold significant implications for the future design and implementation of childbirth promotion and gender equality policies.

We test if employers in China learn asymmetrically about worker's productivity and the implication on statistical discrimination against women. Using data from the 2018 survey of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), we find evidence of asymmetric employer learning for non-college graduate workers. Furthermore, employers statistically discriminate against female workers without college education at time of hiring. This statistical discrimination against women does not decrease over time because asymmetric employer learning is found to occur mostly for men. In contrast, no evidence of employer learning or statistical discrimination against women is found for college graduate workers.

This study demonstrates the influence mechanisms of liquidity regulation on banks' carbon bias through a simplified balance sheet model. Subsequently, we empirically analyze the impact of regulatory liquidity pressure on banks' carbon bias by using a sample of 213 Chinese commercial banks from 2009 to 2019. We find that liquidity regulation, which has a significant positive impact on banks' carbon bias, accounts for a 23% increase in the sample banks' aggregated carbon bias before and after the implementation due to the slow pace of decarbonization. Further, this effect becomes smaller when banks have lower initial reliance on stable funding or a lower capital adequacy ratio, and it is mainly found in state-owned, joint-stock, and urban commercial banks; banks with assets of no less than ¥200 billion; and during economic upturn periods. The main findings remain consistent after considering bank proactive liquidity management.

Quarantine is a public health measure that has been used for centuries to curb the spread of infectious diseases, but its social costs remain underexplored. Based on a quarantine event, we conduct online lab-in-the-field experiments in China to examine the effect of institutional quarantine on economic preferences. We find that institutional quarantine reduces social preferences (altruism, trust, and trustworthiness), but has no effect on risk and time preferences. These effects persist throughout the quarantine period. Notably, expressing gratitude through a thank-you note during quarantine can mitigate the adverse effects of institutional quarantine on altruism and trust, though not on trustworthiness. Trust returns to pre-quarantine levels about six months later, altruism also fully recovers after one year and two months, but trustworthiness does not. Policymakers should develop strategies to mitigate the negative social impacts of institutional quarantine.