中国经济评论最新文献

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.

Overseas industrial parks (OIPs) offer platforms to host countries for foreign and domestic company agglomeration in key industries to promote economic development. This study examined 123 Chinese OIPs in “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI) countries to study the productive effects in the host countries for a sample period of 2010 to 2018. It was found that Chinese OIPs, especially high-tech, logistics, multi-sector and state-owned ones, significantly increased local productive capabilities through trade promotion and employment generation. Host countries with higher level of governance, business environment, finance, transport, and bilateral investment protection had more pronounced effects. This paper provides evidence for China's industrial park spillovers and insights into the internationalization performances of developing economies.

We assess the impact of China's bilateral political relations with three main trading partners—the US, Germany, and the UK—on current account balances and exchange rates, over the 1960Q1–2022Q4 period. Relying on the lag-augmented VAR approach with time-varying Granger causality tests, we find that political relationships with China strongly matter in explaining the dynamics of current accounts and exchange rates, supporting the “trade follows the flag” view. Such relationships cause the evolution of the exchange rate (except in the UK) and the current account; these causal links being time-varying for the US and the UK and robust over the entire period for Germany. These findings suggest that policymakers should account for bilateral political relationships to understand the global macroeconomic consequences of political tensions.

Exorbitant land prices have been a significant constraint on firm growth; however, few studies have explored their effect on firms' global value chain (GVC) positions. By treating the 2007 minimum price policy for industrial land as a quasi-natural experiment, this study estimates the impact of land price regulations on firms' GVC positions. Using a difference-in-differences method with continuous treatment intensity, we find that industrial land price regulation has a remarkably negative effect on firms' GVC positions. This effect is primarily observed in small- and medium-sized enterprises and private enterprises. The mechanism analysis suggests that industrial land price regulation has significantly increased the cost of land purchases by firms, squeezing their investment in innovation and reducing the quality of intermediate inputs, thereby degrading their position in GVCs.

The carbon reduction effects of climate mitigation have received much attention, but less attention has been paid to the co-benefits of climate mitigation such as such as air pollution reduction and related health impacts. This oversight may have led to an underestimation of the broader welfare effects of climate mitigation and thus hindering its progress in implementation. This paper investigates the co-benefits of climate mitigation through focusing on the pollution reduction effects of the implementation of the clean development mechanism (CDM), which is an important climate mitigation mechanism to enhance north-south climate cooperation. Using a unique firm-level dataset with data on China's CDM projects from 1998 to 2012, we show that the CDM implementation reduced sulfur dioxide emissions. Mechanism analyses show that the CDM implementation alleviated firms' financing constraints and promoted fossil energy savings, thereby reducing emissions of air pollutants that usually coexist with greenhouse gases in burning fossil fuels. We also find that the CDM didn't bring about the expected technological progress. These results highlight environmental co-benefits of climate mitigation and provide important implications for international climate cooperation