中国经济评论最新文献

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.

We investigate how cadre incentives within political organizations affect innovation activities in China. Analyzing prefecture-level data between 2006 and 2015, we find that prefecture-level mayors are more likely to be promoted in regions with a strong innovation performance, as indicated by the number of patents, especially in prefectures with strict innovation evaluations. We also identify inter-jurisdictional competition among local governments in the field of technological innovation, which is reflected in competition over the number of patents. We show that this competition effect holds after controlling for knowledge spillover effects. Our study highlights the important role of political incentives of government officials in promoting innovation in developing countries.

Tax incentives are closely related to employees' income. The relationship between tax incentives and firm social insurance contributions is underexplored in existing literature. We construct a theoretical model to portray the impact of tax incentives on firm social security contributions and use China's accelerated depreciation policy for fixed assets (AD reform) to test it empirically. We find that the tax incentives effectively increase the social security contributions of firms. This effect is more pronounced in large firms, firms with high capital intensity, firms with strong bargaining power of employees, and firms with social security contributions levied by the social security department. Moreover, the AD reform promotes improvements in firm productivity and performance by increasing investment in machinery and equipment, increasing the rents shared by firms with employees, and thus indirectly boosting firms' social security contributions. Overall, Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of rent-sharing between firms and employees, as well as enhancing our understanding of the effective incidence of taxes in less developed regions.

This paper develops a model that allows for heterogenous contemporaneous peer effects among different types of agents who are endogenously selected into different peer groups. We apply our approach to migrant and local students in Shanghai, where local students all go to public schools, but migrant students are endogenously selected into either public schools or lower-quality private schools. The results suggest large contemporaneous peer effects among all student groups. We conduct policy experiments to examine the effect of transferring migrant students from private schools to public schools, and show that peer effect can be substantially more important than the school effect.

Why does shadow banking persist in China despite repeated policy efforts to contain it? While studies of informal finance have traditionally emphasized the credit needs of private businesses as a demand-side explanation, this study contends that China's local public finance also constitutes an important driver for shadow banking. Based on document research and administrative data, we find that China's shadow banking system has bifurcated into two segments since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). One is the ‘entrepreneurial shadow’ that has long provided informal credit to the private sector, especially small- and medium-sized enterprises. The other is a ‘fiscal shadow’, which serves property developers and local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), the two pillars of China's land-based local public finance regime. Property developers are major contributors to local fiscal revenues through the land economy, while LGFVs function as off-balance sheet backdoor financing intermediaries for local governments.

Although localities have borrowed from unconventional sources throughout the reform era, the central government's GFC stimulus plan marked a turning point by fueling a debt-financed real estate and infrastructure construction boom. Property developers and LGFVs were launched onto a highly leveraged model of feverish expansion for over a decade. When the central government abruptly reversed its course by restricting the availability of formal credit, they became further entangled into the fiscal shadow for refinancing. Local public finance has thus become reliant on shadow banking, despite subsequent policy efforts to curb such activity. Our findings suggest the need for a more integrated analytic and regulatory framework that recognizes the mutual dependence between shadow banking and local debt – two major sources of systemic financial risks in China.

This study investigates inequality in diets in China during its economic growth using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (1997–2011). Overall, diet quality was significantly improved over the 14 years, as indicated by the increasing mean of Chinese Healthy Eating Index (CHEI) scores from 40.76 in 1997 to 54.52 in 2011. Initially, dietary improvement favored affluent populations, leading to widening inequality, but it became more equitable in later years. Socioeconomic factors are critical determinants of inequality in diets, with urban-rural disparity being a significant barrier to equalizing diet quality. The results of the Oaxaca decomposition indicate that changes in inequality in diets are primarily driven by the extent to which nutritional choices respond to income fluctuations rather than the actual change in income itself. While women exhibited lower inequality in diets quality compared to men, they were more likely to be situated at a relatively lower level of diet quality. Furthermore, differences in health insurance coverage also play a significant role in the changes observed in inequality in diets. This study highlights the importance of considering income elasticity and its influence on dietary behaviors when examining the dynamics of income-based inequality in diets. Non-dietary factors, including basic health insurance and rural development initiatives, are essential in addressing the developing challenge of inequality in diets during economic growth phases.

Accurately measuring the input of digital capital is of great significance for understanding the development pattern of China's digital economy, nurturing new quality productivity, and achieving high-quality development. However, existing representative studies often assume a constant depreciation rate for capital goods, which does not align with reality. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that estimates the variable depreciation rate for each capital good. By setting the depreciation rate as a function of capital maintenance expenditures and utilization rates, we provide a more realistic approach. The empirical results obtained through Monte Carlo simulation demonstrate that the trend of depreciation rates for all types of capital goods aligns with China's economic development. Additionally, we find that investment-specific technology shock plays a significant role in affecting changes in the depreciation rates of capital goods. This shock leads to an increase in capital utilization rates and a decrease in capital maintenance expenditures, resulting in higher depreciation rates. Notably, the depreciation rate of basic digital capital is more sensitive to exogenous shock compared to non-digital capital. Furthermore, the paper estimates the basic digital capital service of 19 industries in China from 1981 to 2020. The results indicate a steady increase in the services provided by basic digital capital, with particularly rapid growth observed in industries such as information transmission, software and information technology services, and the financial sector. When comparing our estimation results with those of representative literature, we find that the national-level productive capital stock and the basic digital capital services estimated using our methodology closely align with existing literature. This validation confirms the effectiveness of our methodology and the reliability of the estimated industry-level basic digital capital services.

Ethnic stereotype threat is a feeling of being at risk of perceiving a negative stereotype about one's ethnicity. Conducting a lab-in-the-field experiment at 126 rural primary schools in northwest China with a sample of 10,431 students from grade 4 and grade 5, this paper examines the effects of ethnic stereotype threat on students' academic performance. We find that stereotype threat improved minority students' English test scores and had no effect on Han students. Investigations for underlying mechanisms show that stereotype threat improves the ethnic pride of minority students, further improving their English test scores. Heterogeneous analysis shows that the positive effects of stereotype threat on English performance are more evident for minority students whose English teachers are from Han, and also more evident for minority students whose best friends of different ethnicities have higher grades than them. This study provides evidence to support the benefits of inter-ethnic communication and integration among multi-ethnic settings at school.