中国经济评论最新文献

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.

In 2009, China launched a vertical integration pilot program to promote collaboration between tertiary and county hospitals to reduce rural-urban disparities and strengthen capacity building in healthcare services delivery in county healthcare facilities. Through the program, tertiary hospitals implemented a workforce mobility program to temporarily assign selected physicians and healthcare staff to paired county hospitals. This study uses hospital-level data from 2009 to 2015 to investigate the program's impact on medical expenditures and healthcare utilization among patients visiting the paired county hospitals. A difference-in-differences method with hospital and year-fixed effects is used to address the unobservable heterogeneity of hospitals and the potential impact of national healthcare reform. We find that the average outpatient expenditure experienced a 4.0% decline after the county hospitals received paired assistance from tertiary hospitals. The decline is mainly driven by a reduced proportion of diagnostic testing expenditures. However, there is no evidence that the program affected inpatient expenditures. In addition, county hospitals had 5.1% more outpatient visits after receiving paired assistance, while the average length of stay remains stable. These results are robust when we control the effect of the Zero-Markup drug policy and conduct permutation tests of sample assignment. We conclude that the paired assistance program has successfully improved hospital healthcare services delivery and controlled patient expenditures. Vertical integration has improved healthcare system performance in East China from 2009 to 2015.

This study investigates how the development of digital infrastructure in China affects the geographical layout of supply chains of listed companies. This work finds that (1) The development of digital infrastructure has led to firms prefer suppliers or customers nearby, rather than looking for distant supply chain partners. (2) The development of digital infrastructure can reduce the costs of the firms, and improve their productivity. However, firms with cost reduction and productivity improvement will not expand the geographical scope of their supply chains. From the perspective of the concentration of supply chains, firms reduce their dependence on the top five customers and suppliers, indicating that with the support of digital technology, firms are willing to seek new partners to achieve closer and more diversified supply chains. (3) Heterogeneous analysis shows that firms with longer operational time, located in developed regions and eastern regions, or in primary and secondary sectors will choose a closer supply chain partner under the influence of digital infrastructure. (4) Extended analysis shows that digital infrastructure in neighboring cities will weaken the preferences of firms in those regions to find supply chain partners nearby.

Employing a quasi-natural experiment of the National Rural E-commerce Comprehensive Demonstration County (NRECDC) policy, our research aimed to explore the causal effect of e-commerce development and residents' subjective well-being (SWB) in rural China. By adopting the data of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2014 to 2020 and using a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) method, we found that rural e-commerce development resulted in an average increase of 2.40% in happiness scores. This positive effect can be explained by absolute material welfare enhancement, relative disparity reduction, and social capital accumulation. Further evidence suggests that e-commerce users are more likely to benefit from the NRECDC policy and that the synergistic effect of digital finance and e-commerce contributes to rural residents' SWB. However, we revealed that the potential digital divide effect in e-commerce development, due to technological barriers and self-digital exclusion, has not enhanced the SWB of some relatively disadvantaged groups in rural China. Our findings enrich the research field of digital well-being and shed light on the potential digital divide effects of digital tools such as e-commerce in rural China.

The paper utilizes data from the China Family Panel Studies (2014–2018) and China's Input-Output Table to investigate how digital development affects labor mobility decisions at industry level. Our findings demonstrate that the increased levels of digitalization, both in manufacturing and services dimensions, significantly boost the likelihood of labor mobility across industries. This relationship remains valid even after considering endogeneity issues. Mechanism analysis shows that digitalization affects the cross-industry mobility decision of workers by affecting the quality of skill matching, income level, and occupational prestige. The heterogeneous results show that the impact of digital development on industry mobility decisions in the overall and manufacturing dimensions exists in the labor force in economically underdeveloped regions, the labor force engaged in consumer services, and entrepreneurs. The development of digitalization in the services dimension mainly has a strong industry crowding-out effect on the workers from economically developed regions, the workers engaged in non-productive service industries, and the workers with employment security.