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| 1 |
ID:
187809
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| Summary/Abstract |
Importing is an important driving force for a country's economic growth. While importing promotes the expansion of economic scale, does it also lead the increase of pollution emissions in production? In this paper, we establish a micro theoretical model to analyze the impacts of importing on firms’ environmental performance, and then use the data of China's manufacturing firms for empirical tests. We show that the importing of intermediate goods or capital goods will lead to the increase of firms’ production scale, and thereby increasing their total emissions, which suggests that China's environment will be deteriorated by importing. On the other hand, importing also has some positive environmental effects that firms will increase their abatement investment after importing intermediate goods or capital goods, thus firms’ emission intensity can be effectively reduced. Altogether, this paper provides important evidence on the impacts of importing on pollution emissions at product-level. We suggest that when analyzing China's interests in trade, the environmental effects of trade should be taken into consideration, otherwise China's gains from trade will be overestimated. This paper also has important implications that while developing the economy through international trade, the government should strengthen environmental protection and advocate green trade.
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| 2 |
ID:
187820
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| Summary/Abstract |
The health risks of the current COVID-19 pandemic, together with the drastic mitigation measures taken in many affected nations, pose an obvious threat to public mental health. To assess predictors of poor mental health in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this study first implements survey-based measures of health perception biases among Chinese adults during the pandemic. Then, it analyzes their relation to three mental health outcomes: life satisfaction, happiness, and depression (as measured by the CES−D). We show that the health overconfidence displayed by approximately 30% of the survey respondents is a clear risk factor for mental health problems; it is a statistically significant predictor of depression and low levels of happiness and life satisfaction. We also document that these effects are stronger in regions that experienced higher numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths. Our results offer clear guidelines for the implementation of effective interventions to temper health overconfidence, particularly in uncontrollable situations like the COVID-19 pandemic.
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| 3 |
ID:
187810
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| Summary/Abstract |
China recently initiated a major tax reform to convert business tax to value-added tax (BT-to-VAT reform), which opened up the tax deduction chain between industries. We used difference-in-differences model and an administrative firm-level dataset from 2011 to 2017 to explore the effect of BT-to-VAT reform on productivity. We found that in contrast to control firms, this reform increased the productivity of the treated firms by 14.6% on average. The positive effects tended to be strengthened in private, large-scale, and capital-intensive firms, as well as in firms with tight financing constraints. Moreover, these positive results of the BT-to-VAT reform appeared to be driven by its positive effect on fixed asset investment, R&D expenditure, and specialization. These findings demonstrate the transformation of tax system has multiple economic effects in developing countries.
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| 4 |
ID:
187811
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| Summary/Abstract |
This study examines the causal effects of having a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) branch on the coverage of labour contracts and social insurance among employees in private enterprises. Using a regression discontinuity design in a quasi-experimental framework, we find that having a Party branch has a significant effect on the coverage rates of individual and collective labour contracts as well as five social insurance schemes. The positive effect of having a Party branch on contract and social insurance coverage are weaker when the enterprise also has a trade union and staff representative congress, when the entrepreneur is a member of the CCP or the People's Congress or Political Consultative Conference and in provinces in which government intervention is lower or the private sector more developed. We find that firm-level mean wages and spending on training and occupational health and safety mediate the relationship between having a Party branch and labour rights.
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| 5 |
ID:
187815
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| Summary/Abstract |
We study how a public health crisis affects the corporate sector at different phases of outbreak. Using an event study approach, we find significant valuation effects in a sample of Chinese listed firms following two symbolic events in the outbreak of COVID-19: (1) the lockdown of Hubei province; and (2) the containment of the disease in China and its spread to overseas. Market responded negatively (positively) to the first (second) event. Regression analysis further reveals that, following the first event, firms with Hubei (foreign) exposures earned significantly lower (higher) returns. Foreign exposures, however, had significantly negative effects on returns following the second event. The valuation effects of Hubei and foreign exposures also vary across firm ownership and industries. Our results indicate that, in a globalized world, firms' international status, internal networks and input-output linkages all play important roles in determining their exposures to the pandemic.
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| 6 |
ID:
187798
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper is a preliminary attempt to use both the value added approach with double deflation and the expenditure approach to deflate China's nominal GDP over 15 years (2004–2018). The results show that China's real GDP growth during the period has significantly more fluctuations than the official statistics indicate. Additionally, inflation, as measured by the official implicit GDP deflator, is generally overestimated during boom years but underestimated during downturn years. In particular, it is shown that China's growth slowdown in recent years before the COVID-19 pandemic may have been more severe than official figures suggest.
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| 7 |
ID:
187803
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| Summary/Abstract |
Poor targeting performance is a common concern in the increasingly implemented decentralized targeted antipoverty programs in developing countries. Different from previous literature that focuses on targeting errors caused by elite capture, we explore the role of villager social capital as a whole in poverty targeting in the context of China's Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) policy. The empirical analysis uses a unique census-type data from three administrative and seventeen natural villages in the poverty-stricken county in Western China in 2017. Villager social capital is measured by a proxy index by combing reciprocity, support time, gift expenses, and political connection of villagers. We verify that the villager with rich villager social capital is more likely to be a beneficiary of TPA by using instrumental variable estimation. The nonpoor can mobilize their higher level of social capital than the poor to capture the beneficiary quotas that should be allocated to the poor, resulting in mistargeting. Such effect persists after controlling political elite capture effects. The findings point out villager social capital is the root cause of poor targeting in decentralized targeting programs in rural China and also lend new support from China to the classic debate on social capital is not the capital of the poor.
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| 8 |
ID:
187821
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper explores the effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on industrial pollution using China's real-time pollution data and a novel news-based EPU index constructed by Davis, Liu, and Sheng (2019). Empirical results suggest that EPU can significantly promote sulfur dioxide (SO2) readings in cities experiencing higher ex-ante fiscal pressure, and this effect is more profound during the daytime. Given that SO2 is the main contributor to industrial pollution, and local governments have less incentive to monitor illegal pollutant discharges during the nighttime period, our findings indicate that rising EPU will harm the environment by motivating local authorities to reduce environmental supervision and thus increase industrial pollution. We also find that promoting regional innovation and strengthening external environmental regulations can mitigate the pollution effect of economic policy uncertainty.
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| 9 |
ID:
187808
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| Summary/Abstract |
Teacher's holding an administrative position (AP) while teaching is common in schools in China. Does it harm the students' academic performance? This paper uses a representative survey of middle school students in China to answer the question. Using a causal identification based on schools with random class assignments, we find that the effect of a headteacher's holding an AP is negative and significant. In contrast, the effect of a subject teacher's holding an AP may be positive. The results are robust to various robustness checks. The heterogeneity analysis shows that the negative effect is driven by 9th grade students and is larger for boys, rural students, those whose parents migrate out to work, and those whose mothers have lower levels of education. Mechanism analysis suggests that head teachers with an AP devote lower levels of teaching effort, measured by time spent on grading and frequency of adopting supplementary teaching tools.
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| 10 |
ID:
187802
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| Summary/Abstract |
The behavior of entrepreneurs is significantly affected by the rules of the game and the behaviors of government officials, because they can affect the relative payoffs to different entrepreneurial activities. Based on a representative survey data of private firms and the information of city government officials in China, this paper shows that the change of key local government officials affects the time allocation of the entrepreneurs, and subsequently the performance of firms. In order to maintain and develop the business-government relationship, entrepreneurs have to allocate less time on productive activities and more time on non-productive activities. This effect is particularly large if 1) entrepreneurs do not have political connections, 2) new officials lack local working experience, 3) private firms belong to special industries, 4) private firms have large number of employees. This paper provides micro-level evidence to Baumol's entrepreneurship allocation theory and a mechanism to account for the observed negative effect of local government leadership turnover on local economic growth in China.
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| 11 |
ID:
187805
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper studies the effects of school closure on household labor supply exploiting China's large-scale rural primary school closing during the early 2000s. Using CHNS 1991–2011 and CHIP 2007–2008 datasets and a difference-in-differences approach, we find that school closure significantly increases the total annual income of mothers of primary school-aged children, which comes virtually entirely from increases in wage income, due to more participation, more working hours, and higher wage rates. This significant positive effect can plausibly be attributed to their migration responses: mothers engage in temporary rural-urban migration to care for children following school closure. We find no effects on fathers' income and migration behavior. Our study provides the first causal estimation of the impacts of school closure on household labor supply and sheds light on the migration decision-making of rural females.
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| 12 |
ID:
187807
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| Summary/Abstract |
We examine whether access to higher education impacts household saving rates. A 2-period model of household saving decisions demonstrates why increased college opportunities induce households with children to save more. We examine this theory using survey data from Chinese households during the unprecedented education expansion. Using estimates of the change in the expected probability of college attendance, we estimate the effect on household saving rates by comparing households before and after the reform. We find that a 10-percentage point increase in the probability of going to college raises the saving rate by 5.9 percentage points.
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| 13 |
ID:
187799
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| Summary/Abstract |
We investigate the causality between government fiscal stress and the formation of zombie firms. We use the province-managing-county reform recently initiated in China to exogenously identify the change in financial pressures of local governments. Matching industrial firm data and county economic data from 1999 to 2013, we carry out difference-in-differences estimation and find that the possibility of zombie firms' formation significantly decreases after the reform. Specifically, the suppression effect is more pronounced in counties with low level of initial economic development, more debt stocks, poor financial situations, and high employment pressures. Further, the mechanism analysis shows that the reform improves firms' performance, such as productivity and profitability, through the decline of tax burden, which inhibits the formation of zombie firms. Our study contributes to a profound understanding of the causes of zombie firms in a large transition economy.
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| 14 |
ID:
187813
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this paper, we empirically study the impact of gender identity on wives' relative income within households in China and find that a husband's and a wife's traditional gender identity statistically significantly and negatively affect the wife's relative income in the household. The heterogeneous effects of gender identity for different residence types, education levels, and age groups are also studied. Supporting empirical evidence is explored for the preference mechanism that couples with traditional gender identities are more averse to having a wife who earns more than her husband. We also find that a husband earns less if the husband or the wife has a traditional gender identity.
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| 15 |
ID:
187806
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| Summary/Abstract |
Existing studies provide the estimates of climate change's impact on energy consumption, yet little attention has been paid to inequality based on fine-grained data. This paper takes advantage of the large-scale smart meter data to investigate the electricity consumption inequality and adaptation vulnerability issues. We find that there is a serious inequality underestimation issue arising from annual aggregate data. An average of 8.39% of the inequality is hidden every quarter, while the monthly hidden value reached 13.41% due to the seasonal offset effects. This inequality is the robust nonlinear inverted-N shaped relationship with temperature, which implies that the cold temperatures have a more severe impact on social inequality issues than hot. For cold days, one additional day in the range < 30 °F would result in an increase of 3.05% electricity consumption inequality. We also find households in high inequality cities have worse response ability when facing extreme temperature, indicating poor will suffer more from extreme temperature exposure. Policies to address climate-induced inequality issues would be more efficient if more attention be paid to the poor in cold winter.
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| 16 |
ID:
187822
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| Summary/Abstract |
We examine the teacher labour market in China using the 2005 mini-Census, in the context of the transformation of the world's largest education system. We first document a significant increase not only in quantity, but also in quality of teachers during 1990–2005. Instrumental Variables results based on the natural experiment of a substantial expansion of higher education in 1992/93 indicate a large positive causal effect of the expansion on supply of teachers. Consistent with differential opportunity costs across graduate occupations, the supply effect is more pronounced for women and those living in less developed regions. Further analyses of differential college premiums in earnings and non-pecuniary benefits between teaching and non-teaching occupations suggest that teacher recruitment has become more market-oriented and flexible, in attracting low to lower-middle ability college graduates into teaching in an increasingly decentralized and competitive graduate labour market.
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| 17 |
ID:
187817
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper studies the impact of lockdown measures in response to the outbreak of COVID-19 on a prefecture's air pollution in China. To avoid potential endogenous problems, we exploit the bilateral population flow from the Baidu Migration Index to predict prefectures' probability to undertake lockdown measures. Our results using difference-in-differences with the instrumental variable show that a prefecture's lockdown measures significantly reduce its air quality index (AQI) by around 35%, and yet the result for difference-in-differences with OLS is only around 11%. We also find that a prefecture under lockdown reduces its PM10 and PM2.5 by around 25% and 35% respectively, and the results of diff-in-diff with OLS are only around 11% and 12%. The sharp difference between these two approaches seems to imply that there is a strong heterogeneity in lockdown stringency across prefectures.
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| 18 |
ID:
187819
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| Summary/Abstract |
We provide a first view of vulnerable informal economy after the blows from COVID-19, using transaction-level business data of around 80 million offline micro businesses (OMBs) owners from the largest Fintech company in China and employing machine learning method for causal inference. We find that the OMBs activities in China experienced an immediate and dramatic drop of 50% during the trough. The businesses had rebounded to around 80% of where they should be seven weeks after the COVID-19 outbreak, but had remained at this level until the end of our time window. We find a larger disruption to the OMBs in urban areas, the female merchants and the merchants who were not grown up in the places where they conducted businesses. We discuss the implications for policy support to the most vulnerable, and highlight the importance to take full advantage of digital development to follow up the informal economy.
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| 19 |
ID:
187800
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper explores gender differences in intergenerational patterns of education attainment in China. Using the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) survey for 2016, we find that intergenerational ‘persistence’, as reflected in high regression and correlation coefficients between an individual's and their parents' education levels, is higher for females than males for the entire sample and for each of four age cohorts. This result stems primarily from the relative lack of upward mobility among females from families with low levels of education, as confirmed by a series of educational mobility matrices and a multinomial logistic regression analysis. The results offer novel insights into gender differences in the unequal transmission of education across generations, with significant implications for gender inequality more broadly in Chinese society.
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| 20 |
ID:
187804
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| Summary/Abstract |
This study investigates the effect of grandparental involvement in childcare on children's locus of control (LOC), which is an important non-cognitive skill that affects children's future development. We use data from the China Family Panel Studies, which is a nationally representative survey, and employ instrumental variables to address the endogeneity of family childcare choice. We find that children with grandparental care have more external LOC than children in the sole care of their parents do; that is, they are more likely to attribute individual success to external factors, such as luck, fate, and family background. This finding is robust to different measures of grandparental involvement in childcare and different model specifications, as well as a minor violation of the exclusion restriction of the instruments. We further examine the potential mechanisms underlying this effect. Grandparents have more external LOC than parents do, which can affect children's LOC through intergenerational transmission of LOC. Their parenting attitudes and styles are also different from parents' in that grandparents take less responsibility for children's academic performance than parents do and are less strict with children. In addition, grandparental care induces adverse effects on children's family environment.
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