|
|
|
Sort Order |
|
|
|
Items / Page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
159041
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This paper examines how political considerations affect local officials' revenue maximization behaviors in the context of urban land conveyance in China. Particularly, we analyze government intervention based on local officials' choice of two land auction types, namely, “English auction” and “two-stage auction”. The latter presumably serves as a tool of government intervention. We aim to address the research question: “Are local governments maximizing land revenue?” The major findings are threefold. First, for cities with higher housing prices, two-stage auctions are adopted more frequently than English auctions. In addition, land parcels in these “hot” cities adopt two-stage auctions more frequently during sensitive political events, suggesting that local officials respond positively to the real estate regulation policy from central government. Second, when city leaders are more incentivized to promote economic performance, they respond less positively to rises in housing prices. Third, such interventionist behavior results in a significantly depressed land price and housing price. Despite its intention of improving public welfare, this interventionism can susceptibly cause problems of misallocation and corruption.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 2 |
ID:
159039
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
As the world has moved toward the era of non-communicable diseases, whether the individuals are in a capable position to accurately evaluate their own health status has an important implication on disease prevention in particularly and population health outcome in general. In this paper, we address four important questions surrounding the accuracy of health perception: (1) to what extent that individuals can make an accurate evaluation on their own health status; (2) what are the major factors influencing health misperception if any; (3) what are the causal directions between health behavior and health perception; and (4) whether individuals can learn and update their self-evaluation on health status over time and whether such learning is productive in that it mitigates the health misperception. Specifically, we use a longitudinal data set obtained from Taiwan that covers six waves of survey over about twenty-year period to compare the ex ante subjective perception on health and the ex post mortality hazards. Our results suggest that over one third of the survey respondents are not performing well in the evaluation of their own health status. We also find that smokers are more likely to have an optimistic bias on their own health assessment as compared to nonsmokers. After controlling for the simultaneous causality problem, we find a causal effect of individuals' misperceptions on continuing smoking, but not vice versa. In addition, our results show that individuals update their subjective perception on health over time through the learning from personal health shocks and the provision of public information on smoking hazards. Although the learning process tends to be overshooting among smokers, it is beneficial to mitigate the optimistic bias. We also find the evidence that personal health shock has a stronger impact on updating behavior than public information, indicating that personal experience is a more effective channel through which to correct the bias in health perception, compared to the provision of public information, such as anti-smoking campaign.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 3 |
ID:
159037
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In the decade 1998–2008 China expanded enrolment in higher education almost six-fold. For the examination of its short term labour market consequences, this unprecedentedly huge and sudden policy change might be regarded as a natural experiment. After providing a theoretical framework for analysis, the paper uses urban labour market surveys to analyse how the labour market adjusted to the supply shock. Three outcomes are examined: the effect of the expansion on wages, on unemployment, and on access to ‘good jobs’. The shock is found to reduce relative wages, raise the unemployment rate, and reduce the proportion in good jobs, but only for the entry-year or entry-period cohort of graduates. The effect is fairly powerful for entrants, especially university rather than college graduates, but incumbent graduates are largely protected from the supply shock. An attempt is made to examine the labour market effects of the quantitative expansion on educational quality. The paper provides insight into the operation of China's labour market in recent years.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 4 |
ID:
159038
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
We uniquely analyze the advantages and disadvantages of private ownership versus state ownership under various circumstances by focusing on three aspects: external risk, internal governance, and relative importance of owners versus managers. Our theoretical analysis indicates that private ownership is better than state ownership if the business environment is risky, corruption is limited, or the manager plays a more important role than the owner. Our empirical analysis supports our theoretical findings and reveals that better internal governance, more external risk and greater importance of the manager will magnify the benefits of privatization.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 5 |
ID:
159035
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Since 1984, the foreign debt of the Peoples' Republic of China has increased at a greater rate than would be explained by changes in the country's current account, foreign direct investment and reserve holdings. This pattern is consistent with large-scale outflow of financial capital, commonly referred to as capital flight. Since 2005, capital flight has accelerated reaching $425 billion (plus or minus $60 billion) in 2014 alone. This study provides three estimates for capital flight from China for the period 1984 through 2014 using both Cuddington's balance of payments and more inclusive residual measures. These measures are adjusted to reflect the legitimate assets of the Chinese banking industry, mis-invoicing of China's trade with its major trading partners (especially Hong Kong), exchange rate changes, and the failure of official debt data to capture certain bank transactions. Based on these estimates, it is concluded that capital controls have little long-term effect on the volume of capital flight, Hong Kong is increasingly a pipeline for capital flight from the mainland, and that ‘traditional’ explanations do not apply to China's capital flight over the last decade. Finally, corruption, transaction costs, and facilitating migration are considered as possible explanations of the recent acceleration of Chinese capital flight.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 6 |
ID:
159032
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Following the general trend in demographic change, and enhanced by the large-scale and continuous rural-urban migration, the rural labor force remaining in farming is quickly reducing and aging. This is likely to have significant impact on the labor-intensive agriculture. However, the fast growing of machinery service has provided farmers an opportunity to out-source field work that demands heavy labor inputs. Therefore, the demographic change and development of machinery service may jointly influence farmers' production decision in terms of crop choice and inputs. Household data of Fixed Point Rural Survey (FPRS) are used to examine the potential change in farmers' decisions on crop mix and input uses. It is found out that, under current situations, aging may impact agriculture through changing crop mix, and the choice is largely determined by access to service of farm machine; which, in turn, is likely to be determined by topography.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 7 |
ID:
159031
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Using micro-data from the Taiwan Population and Housing Census, this study estimates the causal effect of fertility on the labor supply of married women. To address the endogeneity of fertility, we exploit exogenous variations in the number of children caused by twin births, which can be considered a natural experiment. The instrumental variable estimates indicate that an additional child reduces female employment by 10.5 percentage points for those who have at least one delivery, and the effects gradually decline for females who have two or more deliveries, with the effects vanishing when females have three or more deliveries. Also, the effect of fertility varies substantially with the time elapsed since the last childbirth, which has a consequence for differences in estimates across different samples in the literature.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 8 |
ID:
159036
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Previous studies in the border-effect literature surprisingly found that domestic border effects are larger than international border effects (e.g., in the United States or Brazil). One interpretation of this result is that these estimates include the effects of producer agglomeration. Therefore, in this study, we estimate those border effects exclusively for transactions for final consumption, in which such agglomeration forces will be weak, in China and Japan. As a result, we found larger international border effects and could not find a significant role for producer agglomeration in the estimates of border effects. We also found that China's accession to the World Trade Organization reduces border effects in trading between China and Japan but does not decrease domestic border effects.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 9 |
ID:
159034
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
We examine economic returns to proficiency in English in China using two waves of the China Labor-Force Dynamics Survey (CLDS). We find positive earnings returns to proficiency in English. We find considerable heterogeneity in the economic returns to proficiency in English across age groups, coastal and inland provinces, levels of education and occupation. We find that the returns to proficiency in English are higher in the coastal region, higher for women and evidence of education-language and skill-language complementarity. We also see differences in the economic returns to English between urban and rural residents and between rural-urban migrants and urban locals. Our findings help to explain why the demand for learning English is so high in China, as well as having implications for the Chinese government at a time when it is re-evaluating the importance attached to learning English in the curriculum.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 10 |
ID:
159042
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Analyzing monetary policy in China is not straightforward because the People's Bank of China (PBoC) implements policy by using more than one instrument. In this paper we use a Qual VAR, a conventional VAR system augmented with binary policy announcements, to extract a latent indicator of tightening and easing pressure, respectively, for China. The model acknowledges that policy announcements are endogenous and summarizes policy by a single indicator. The Qual VAR allows us to study the impact of monetary policy in terms of unexpected changes in these latent variables, which we identify using sign restrictions. We show that the transmission of monetary policy impulses to the rest of the economy is similar to the transmission process in advanced economies in terms of both output growth and inflation despite a very different monetary policy framework. We find that bank loans are not sensitive to policy changes, which implies that window guidance is still a necessary policy tool. We also find that the impact of monetary policy shocks is asymmetric in terms of asset prices, that is, the asset price reactions differ in their sensitivity to tightening shocks and easing shocks, respectively. In particular, an easing of monetary conditions boosts stock prices while a tightening shock leaves stock prices unaffected. This shows that monetary policy is not a suitable tool to stabilize asset prices, which raises implications for financial stability and macroprudential policy.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 11 |
ID:
159029
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
By 2010, only one-quarter of workers in China had received a high school (HS) education. One of the root causes of this low rate is that China has the highest HS tuition fees globally. Although the Chinese government has implemented a series of programs to reduce the cost of attending vocational HS, the cost of attending academic HS in China emains high. This study evaluates the extent to which an academic HS tuition relief program initiated by a poor county in western China affects students' schooling decisions after graduation from junior high school. By using a longitudinal dataset of 2348 students in two counties, we use ordinary least squares and propensity score matching to evaluate the impact of this program on four student outcomes: matriculation into academic HS, matriculation into vocational HS, entering the labor market, and retaking high school entrance exams. The results show that the program significantly increased matriculation into academic HS by 21 percentage points, while it reduced matriculation into vocational HS by 7 percentage points, the likelihood of entering the labor market by 11.9percentage points, and the likelihood of retaking exams by 2.1 percentage points. Further, we find that the effects of the program among middle-income students are stronger compared with those of other groups. And we found that the program had no significantly heterogeneous impact on students with different academic performance.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 12 |
ID:
159040
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
Despite small landholdings, a high degree of land fragmentation, and rising labor costs, agricultural production in China has steadily increased. If one treats the farm household as the unit of analysis, it would be difficult to explain the conundrum. When seeing agricultural production from the lens of the division of labor, the puzzle can be easily solved. In response to rising labor costs, farmers outsource some power-intensive stages of production, such as harvesting, to specialized mechanization service providers, which are often clustered in a few counties and travel throughout the country to provide harvesting services at competitive prices. Through such an arrangement, smallholder farmers can stay viable in agricultural production.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 13 |
ID:
159033
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
China has long aimed to restrict population growth in large cities but encourages growth in small and medium-sized cities. At the same time, various government policies favor large cities. We conjecture that larger cities in China offer a better quality of life and more opportunities. We thus predict that a typical rural-urban migrant is willing to give up some income in order to live in a larger city. We present a simple model in which rural-urban migrants choose destination cities to maximize utilities from consumption and urban amenities. Drawing data from a large-scale population survey conducted in 2005, we first estimate each migrant's expected earnings in each possible destination city using a semi-parametric method to correct for potential selection bias. We then estimate the typical migrant's preference for city population size, instrumenting population size with its lagged values to control for potential omitted-variables bias. From these estimation results, we calculate the typical migrant's willingness to pay to live in larger cities. Our results show that indeed rural-urban migrants strongly prefer cities with larger populations. We explore possible explanations for this preference and discuss the implications of these findings.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 14 |
ID:
159028
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
This study first investigates determinants of job searching strategies and then examines if social networks are connected with better job outcomes. Unlike previous studies that focus solely on income, this paper pays more heed to job satisfaction. Based on data drawn from China General Social Survey, we find that disadvantaged job seekers rely primarily on informal channels; whereas experienced and better-educated job seekers tend to search for jobs through formal channels. However, those reaping the largest benefit from using networks are the job seekers who are able to use formal and informal channels jointly. By disaggregating the whole sample, we further find that the promoting effect of network use is contingent on factors such as gender and types of jobs. Network use brings about larger benefits to female and job seekers target to prestigious occupations. Finally, it appears that whether a job seeker can receive influential help depends primarily on the social status of the contacts rather than their tie strength. The results of our paper thus urge us to examine the combination of different searching strategies rather than studying them separately.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 15 |
ID:
159030
|
|
|
|
|
| Summary/Abstract |
We investigate the determinants of firm corruption and highlight contagious diffusion of firm corruption under mutual influences of firms' past corrupt history and between peers. The analysis finds that firms' decision-making on engagement in corruption can be affected vertically by their own past experience of bribing bureaucrats and horizontally by the contagion effects of neighbors' observed malfeasance, while there is substantial regional heterogeneity. Moreover, these horizontal contagion effects are nonlinear depending on the distance between neighbors. We also identify three channels underlying “osmosis” of corruption: firms' geographic networks, information exposure, and local marketization. The strongest contagion effect appears in the eastern region, indicating that petty firm corruption can develop into a systematic phenomenon. More practical anti-corruption policies call for cooperation in design and implementation across administrative areas.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|