中国经济评论最新文献

The impact of trade liberalization on regional employment dynamics remains a topic of ongoing debate and scrutiny. This study aims to provide a nuanced understanding by focusing specifically on the effects of imported capital goods trade. Our study analysis reveals that capital goods trade liberalization predominantly leads to a substitution effect between capital and labor, resulting in a reduction in overall regional employment levels. However, we also find complementary effects between capital and high-skilled labor, alongside substitution effects on low-skilled labor, which collectively influence the regional labor market's skill structure. Furthermore, our study identifies the heterogeneous spillover effects of capital goods trade liberalization on regional labor markets, varying across different regions and city scales. We argue that investing in region skill development resources can help align the workforce with global factors, fostering positive interaction between regions.

This study contributes to the growing body of research on peer effects in educational contexts by examining the peer effects on learning behaviors, which are pivotal in understanding how peers impact academic achievements, especially in online education. Drawing upon an administrative dataset and a learning behavior dataset from an online education platform at a Chinese research university in 2020, we employ fixed effects and dynamic models to investigate the peer effects on undergraduates' class absence. Notably, we further consider partially overlapping networks of peers and utilize the class absence of “classmates of classmates” (who are not one's own classmates) as instrumental variables for peers' absence to address potential estimation biases. Our findings reveal significantly positive effects of classmates' class absence on individuals' both full-class and part-class absence in synchronous online courses. Additionally, heterogeneity analyses show that males, freshmen and sophomore students are more susceptible to peer influence and exhibit greater influence on their peers, and peer effects are stronger in subject required courses, courses with larger class sizes, courses with mandatory attendance policies, and among students in the same department or grade level.

Despite extensive research on the impact of corporate tax cuts on firm-level outcomes, their effects on worker health have yet to be examined. This study aims to address this research gap by utilizing individual-level panel data from the China Family Panel Studies between 2010 and 2018, and by exploiting exogenous shock in the corporate effective tax burden stemming from accelerated depreciation. Our results yield three key findings: first, that corporate tax cuts significantly reduce worker health; second, that this effect may be driven by increased working hours and poor health behaviors; third, that corporate tax cuts exacerbate health inequalities based on gender, education level, executive positions, and employed company. These findings shed light on the wider implications of tax incentives for corporate investment and contribute to stimulating interest in the welfare of workers in a global wave of tax cuts.

In this paper, we analyze how Chinese mutual funds' performance is affected by cross-border investments, following the relaxation of investment restrictions on Hong Kong stocks. We find that mutual funds underperform when they increase their H-share holdings, suggesting that easing investment restrictions doesn't improve fund performance. Information asymmetry and the limited ability of fund managers to access H-share information are key factors behind poor performance. And fund managers employ such “bad” strategy to cater to investor preferences. Furthermore, fund managers do not recognize their limitations in investing H-share. We hope our findings give insights into the investment behavior of funds and enhance the development of the Chinese asset management industry.

We study how mortality salience influences people's time preference and prosocial behavior in a laboratory experiment. We made mortality salient through priming subjects in the treatment group with grid tasks, and studied its impact on altruistic giving in an Andreoni-Miller dictator game. We found that the priming made subjects think bigger, and become more concerned with the overall social welfare, though it did not necessarily make them care more about their opponents' well-being per se. Subjects in the treatment group became more altruistic only when the price of giving is low. We built a two-period model to explain the mechanism of the findings. Our model showed that the priming altered altruistic giving through changing the subjects' time preference and social preference parameters. Finally, we strengthened our findings by showing that the priming didn't change subjects' mood.

Many scholars attribute the slowdown of economic growth to population aging and its negative impact on the size of the labor force. Meanwhile, government programs targeting an aging society can generate work disincentives. This paper studies the unintended labor market effects of Long-term Care Insurance (LTCI) among people of older age by exploiting the launch of the LTCI program in China. We find that policy-covered older adults decreased labor market engagement, significantly increasing the probability of exiting the labor market completely or not working full-time. We also document more substantial effects among those with low income, poor health, advanced age, and few children. The forgone wages of older adults account for >0.25% of GDP. These findings have policy implications for countries “growing old before getting rich.”

This study examines the impact of trade liberalization on the consumption welfare of urban households in China. The results indicate that trade liberalization in consumer goods has improved the consumption welfare of Chinese urban households with a “pro-poor” distribution across regions and households in a region, suggesting that the consumption effects are more pronounced for less developed regions and low-income households in a region. Within a city, differences in the consumption effects arise from variations in household consumption structures and the tariff-price pass-through among different types of products. Across cities, differences in the consumption effects stem from the dual heterogeneity in industrial structure and consumer demand. The variety effect resulting from changes in the types of imported consumer goods also enhances the consumption effects of trade liberalization.

We use the short-lived, but high-profile, China Top Brand Award to examine the causal effects of nonmonetary awards on firm innovation. To do so, we create a panel dataset by matching official China Top Brand Award recipients to the innovation outputs of listed companies. Results from difference-in-differences estimates show that firms that received the China Top Brand Award have a higher number, and better quality, of filed patents. We find that the positive effects of winning the China Top Brand Award on innovation outputs operate through higher government subsidies to winning firms. We also find that the positive effects of award-winning are stronger among state-owned enterprises, larger enterprises, and better-performing enterprises, as well as in provinces with stronger intellectual property rights protection. Our results are robust to a series of sensitivity checks.

Uniform government public policy has steadily shaped the labor supply from households in the past few decades in China with possible differential impact on each parent. This paper investigates how uniform tax policy change plays differential roles in household's labor supply through government public education spending. Utilizing the exogenous shock from China's agricultural tax abolition in 2005, we find that the abolition results in a reduction in female employment but an increase in male employment. Specifically, a 1% increase of agricultural tax to public revenue ratio in the reference year leads to a 0.485% labor supply reduction and 1.50 fewer hours of work per month for married women, whereas the married men's labor supply increases by 0.191% and their working hours by 1.06 h in a typical urban family with school-going children. The effects are greater on married women with primary school-age children and married men from high-asset households. Our mechanism analysis indicates that public education spending works as a substitute for private education spending and affects the household labor supply through investment in children's human capital. Our findings offer a new perspective on the decreasing female labor supply and the widening employment gap between (married) women and (married) men in the Chinese labor market. The findings suggest that public tax policy could lead to unintended consequences on household's labor supply decisions, and thus exacerbate the gender employment gap in the labor market.

Trading with developed countries has been shown to promote technological progress. However, it remains unclear whether trade between developing countries promotes or hinders technological progress. To address this gap, the present study utilizes micro data from the 2006–2021 World Bank Enterprise Surveys for 139 developing countries to assess the link between exports to China and innovation activities. We analyze the relationship between exports to China and various proxies for firm-level innovation activities in other developing countries. Our findings suggest that exports to China significantly enhance innovation in other developing countries, regardless of the innovation measures used. The heterogeneous analysis shows that the effects are more pronounced for mature firms and exporters, while young firms and non-exporters are more likely to introduce process innovation directly, rather than spending more on R&D. This effect becomes more pronounced after the implementation of China's Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. The underlying mechanism is that exporting to China (only for capital-intensive goods) could increase the demand for skilled labor, thereby contributing to higher innovation activities among firms in developing countries, as evidenced by firms hiring a greater proportion of skilled labor. These labor adjustments could contribute to the increase in the likelihood of firms introducing process innovation and spending on R&D by 38% and 47%, respectively.