中国经济评论最新文献

This study establishes a causal impact of China Rural Nutrition Improvement Program (CRNIP) on the labour force participation of Chinese rural mothers, utilizing quasi-exogenous variation in the timing of program implementation across the country. Drawing on 1% samples of the 2010 and 2015 Chinese Population Censuses, we find that the CRNIP, which provided free lunch meals to students during their compulsory education, significantly enhanced maternal labour force participation by an estimated 4.25 percentage points, while showing no effects for fathers. The provision of school lunches reduced the time mothers spent on childcare, primarily benefiting less-educated mothers, who opted for informal, off-farm work in their local area. While only small in magnitude, this finding has significant policy implications for a country facing a declining population in general, and declining female labour force participation in particular.

This paper employs a difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) identification strategy to investigate the impact of environmental regulation on employment in the manufacturing sector in China, using the country's Eleventh Five-Year Plan (FYP) as a quasi-experiment. Our results indicate that the 11th FYP had a significant negative impact on firm employment, with every 10% increase in SO₂ reduction targets resulting in a 3.1% decrease in employment for firms in high-pollution industries. This corresponds to a reduction of approximately 9 people per firm. Our findings indicate that firms primarily reduce SO₂ emissions by reducing production levels and transitioning to cleaner energy sources. Additionally, we show that political promotion incentives played a role in driving the decline in employment. Heterogeneous tests reveal that the impact was more significant for private firms, SMEs and trade-exposed firms.

We employ the 1959–1961 Chinese Great Famine as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the relationship between experiencing adversity in childhood and financial decisions in adulthood. Using data from the 2017 China Household Finance Survey and the intensity of excess deaths during the Great Famine, results from our preferred two-part fractional regression model suggest that, for an additional excess death per thousand people during the Famine, cohorts who were in their infancy and early childhood during the Famine are 0.2–0.3 percentage points less likely to hold risky financial assets than other cohorts. We also find that, conditional on the decision to hold risky assets, those who experienced an additional excess death per thousand people during the Famine in their middle to late childhood hold 1.1 percentage points higher share of risky assets in their household financial portfolios than those who did not experience the Famine. We explore several potential mechanisms and find that financial literacy, risk-taking preferences and locus of control are channels through which childhood adversity in the famine years affects household portfolio decisions. Our findings are robust to a series of sensitivity checks.

This paper provides the first empirical evidence on the value of teacher education by comparing the effectiveness of traditionally trained teachers from teachers' colleges and non-traditionally trained teachers from comprehensive universities in China. We utilize the unique data of 424 traditionally and 40 non-traditionally trained teachers from a top school district in China and a cross-subject value-added model to address teacher-student sorting bias. Our results indicate that, on average, traditionally trained teachers contribute approximately 0.1 standard deviations higher value to students' high-stakes test scores over a three-year period than non-traditionally trained teachers. Behavioral analyses on the district's teacher survey suggest that while teachers from both routes are similar in time allocation and professional psychological characteristics, traditionally trained teacher report being better in applying multitudinous pedagogies and teaching strategies. We find similar results using two administrative data sources from another province. The findings of this study contribute to the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of alternative routes to teaching and the importance of teacher education.

Non-cognitive abilities strongly predict individual life outcomes. Maternal personality traits play a particularly pivotal role in shaping the non-cognitive abilities of infants and toddlers. However, few studies have been conducted on this topic within the Chinese context. This study aimed to examine the intergenerational transmission effect and mechanism of non-cognitive abilities between mothers and children using the 2021–2022 Wuhan Birth Cohort Studies. The analysis revealed an overall mother-child correlation for non-cognitive abilities of 0.294, with sub-dimensions ranging from 0.03 to 0.17. Higher extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness scores, as well as lower neuroticism scores among mothers were associated with better social-emotional development of children. Nurturing effects were significant in the intergenerational transmission of non-cognitive abilities. These results shed light on public policies aimed at enhancing children's development.

Reducing excessive price fluctuations of Chinese herbal medicines is crucial to the high-quality development of traditional Chinese medicine. The research utilises the relatively advanced Generalized Supremum Augmented Dickey-Fuller (GSADF) methodology to uncover multiple bubbles in the Chinese herbal medicine market, marking a pioneering effort in identifying cyclical boom and bust periods in this sector. Furthermore, we innovatively establish the logit regression system to identify the key factors contributing to these bubbles, representing a significant contribution to the field. The quantitative analyses reveal the following key insights: First, seven bubbles existed in the Chinese herbal medicine market from January 2007 to September 2023, consistent with the bubble theory that assumes the existence of expectation and intangible components in the price formation of Chinese herbal medicines. Second, it could be found that speculation and climate factors would cause irrational prosperity in the Chinese herbal medicine market, whereas the former's effect is larger and more significant than that of the latter. Third, the periodical boom and bust episodes in this market are undriven by the pandemic factor. Against the backdrop of frequent occurrences of Chinese herbal medicine bubbles, these conclusions would put forward valuable recommendations for China to promote the health and stable development of the Chinese herbal medicine market.

This study investigates the overweight effect of the soybean import shock (referred to as the soybean overweight shock or “SOS”) on China, the largest importer of soybeans worldwide. By using China's soybean import liberalization in 1996 as a natural experiment, which involved the removal of soybean tariff rate quota (TRQ) policy and a reduction in soybean import tariffs from 114% to 3%, we found significant SOS effects. The soybean import shock can account for 10.76% of the observed increase in overweight probability between 1989 and 2006. Mechanism analysis finds that the exposure to the soybean import shock leads to a significant decrease in the market price of soybean oil and an increase in soybean oil consumption, it also increases the likelihood of being overweight through dining out, eating food prepared outside, and eating fried foods. Additionally, we discovered stronger SOS effects in urban residents, females and individuals with relatively lower family income.

This paper develops a dynamic multisector model to examine the contribution of sectoral productivity shocks and input-output linkages to the dynamics of the Chinese economy. Our baseline simulations replicate the volatility and comovement in the data fairly well. More importantly, we show that the idiosyncratic components of sectoral productivity shocks together with the production linkages are the primary drivers of volatility and comovement, while the common components of sectoral productivity shocks mainly result in resource reallocation across sectors through substitution effects. The sensitivity analysis highlights the importance of elasticity-of-substitution parameters. Finally, the share of state-owned enterprises in each sector is shown to have significant impact on the aggregate volatility.

China's rapid urbanization has intensified urban employment pressure. The National Civilized City (NCC) policy is a significant initiative in China aimed at promoting high-quality urban development. We utilize the NCC policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employ the staggered difference-in-difference method to empirically analyze the impact of urban civilization development on full employment and human capital level. The empirical results demonstrate that NCC policy significantly promotes urban entrepreneurship and employment creation, boosts labor demand of local enterprises, and enhances the human capital level. The positive effect on employment is significant in both talent-intensive and low- and medium-skilled intensive fields. In addition, heterogeneity tests show that this positive effect is more pronounced in low-tier cities and previously polluted cities. Finally, the mechanism analysis indicates that the NCC policy can enhance employment creation through investment promotion at the city level and by expanding production scale at the firm level. The NCC policy's impact on human capital level is supported by technological advancement and innovation emphasis mechanisms from the demand side, as well as talent agglomeration mechanism from the supply side. This study provides policy recommendations for local governments to leverage the achievements of civilized cities in promoting employment.

This paper presents an empirical analysis of plant level responses to the China trade shock based upon a DSGE framework with heterogeneous firms. The empirical analysis shows that soaring imports from China are associated with a higher probability of plant closure. By contrast, firms in export oriented industries are less likely to exit. We rationalize these findings by several counter-factual experiments based upon a DSGE framework. Imports always raise the exit rate but the export-effect is ambiguous. More exports fuel competition among domestic rivals associated with more exits. However, this competition effect disappears when the share of exporters is extremely high. The effects of imports and exports on firm entry are close to zero in both theory and empircs. We also introduce a novel productivity shock channel. Additional export sales better protect firms from other shocks. We show this by introducing negative productivity shocks into the model.