中国经济评论最新文献

In the recent anti-poverty campaign, China's minimum livelihood guarantee program (called Dibao in Chinese) experienced significant changes in that it now includes both cash transfer and special assistances such as education and healthcare subsidies. Therefore, the current Dibao program in China is a composite cash transfer program containing the nature of both unconditional and conditional cash transfers. This paper is the first attempt to examine the impact of a composite cash transfer program on consumption patterns of the poor population by utilizing exogenous variation in the differential size of increases in Dibao subsidy lines across cities. We find that the Dibao reform has a significantly positive effect on total consumption of poor households. In particular, the generosity of this composite cash transfer program increased human capital expenditures to a large extent including expenditures on healthcare and children's education. The Dibao reform also generates positive spillovers such as increasing school enrollment and improving academic performance for children in Dibao families.

This study examines the effect of mandatory CSR disclosure on stock liquidity in the China's stock market. Using a difference-in-differences method, we find supportive and robust evidence that mandatory CSR disclosure significantly reduces stock liquidity by diminishing informational advantages for certain traders, causing them to exit the stock market. Our study highlights unintended liquidity effects of mandatory CSR disclosure, suggesting that policymakers need to consider reactions of the information-advantaged traders, especially in emerging markets with high information asymmetry.

This study investigates consumers' beliefs and valuations toward added sugar and sugar substitutes and assesses the impacts of information intervention in nudging individual healthy food choices, in the context of sugar-sweetened beverage consumption in China. Using a between-subject design, a discrete choice experiment, and a sample of 1800 urban Chinese consumers, we find a positive preference among Chinese consumers for sugar-sweetened beverages with low-sugar content, compared to zero-sugar and high-sugar alternatives. Chinese residents dislike sweeteners mainly due to concerns about their safety. However, individual valuations for sweeteners in both zero-sugar and low-sugar food products are significantly improved after providing information about the function and safety of the sweeteners. Policy implications for reducing sugar consumption in China are discussed in light of these findings.

To investigate the household registration system (hukou) reform in China, it is important to quantify the thresholds of obtaining hukou in urban areas at the city level. We build a new index to measure the likelihood of obtaining urban hukou for migrants in each destination city, termed the “settlement probability”, based on individual information of floating population from the population census and hukou policies of 332 cities from 1996 to 2022. We find that the average settlement probability has been steadily increasing since 1999, reaching 91% in 2022, and 15 provinces have achieved low thresholds. We further build a simple general spatial equilibrium model with the factor of settlement probability to investigate the impacts of hukou reform. The empirical analysis shows there is a mismatch between settlement probability and settlement intentions. Moreover, we find that higher settlement probability is significantly correlated with more migrants' inflow, lower migrants' wages and higher urban housing prices, especially in more developed cities. Therefore, hukou reform is crucial for enhancing the integration of China's labor market.

Incentive adjustments to promote the rational utilization of natural resources by local governments, China has proposed a new policy called Off-Office Audit of Natural Resource Assets (OANRA) targeting local leaders. However, how this policy affects incentives for land use behavior remains understudied. Treating the policy pilot as a quasi-natural experiment, based on the staggered DID method and micro-level land leasing data, we investigate how OANRA changes local government land leasing behavior. The study finds that after the implementation of OANRA, the scale of local land leasing significantly decreased, with a further acceleration nearing the end of the term. This may be attributed to OANRA alleviating fiscal and political incentives that drive land leasing impulses. More directly, the regulatory effect of OANRA reduces non-compliant land leasing by local officials. Interestingly, OANRA also unexpectedly induces officials to become lazy, deterring some compliant land leasing. Our findings provide insights into understanding incentives for land use behavior and better incentivizing local officials to properly utilize and protect land resources.

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.