查看更多>>摘要：Researchers have long puzzled over China?s high household savings rate. Some have hypothesized that the explanation lies with China?s One-Child Policy (OCP). According to this hypothesis, faced with fewer children to support them in their old age, Chinese parents increased their savings to finance retirement. Previous research relied on empirical studies of the relationship between children and saving behavior. However, all of these studies based their analysis on data after the OCP was implemented. Their implicit counterfactual for China without an OCP was households with multiple children living in an OCP environment. In contrast, we compare Chinese people with people from regions that do not have restrictive population policies. These regions share many cultural, demographic and economic characteristics with China that suggest they can be used as a counterfactual for China. This approach enables us to employ a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition procedure to identify the different channels by which children could affect savings. Our results suggest that the OCP decreased households? proclivity to save. The estimated effects are generally small, in the range of one to two percentage points. We find no evidence to indicate that the OCP can explain China?s high saving rate. An implication of our findings is that they suggest that the recent relaxation of the OCP cannot be counted upon to substantially boost Chinese consumption.
查看更多>>摘要：Tapping into the older workforce is a potential economic solution to population aging, but its feasibility depends on the health capacity to work among older people. Existing estimations in OECD countries involve establishing the relationship between work and health on a younger cohort, extrapolating the relationship to older individuals, and deriving the excess health capacity as the difference between predicted and actual employment rates. However, benchmarking on the younger cohort is sub-optimal because the observable retirement-health relationship changes with age. The dual nature of the Chinese social security system provides us with a relatively neat benchmark, allowing us to estimate the excess health capacity among urban workers bench marking on rural residents in the same age range. Using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, this choice, combined with other fine-tuning, yields significantly lower but still substantial excess capacity among older urban workers than benchmarking against younger cohorts. Altogether, among urban Chinese aged 45-69, 31.2 million extra workers can potentially be added to the workforce.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper analyzes the reasons for the rapid increase in the scale of green bonds issued by Chinese commercial banks in recent years from the perspective of financing costs and regulatory arbitrage. Our empirical results show that the financing cost mechanism cannot explain this increase since the financing costs of green bonds are not lower than those of non-green financial bonds. Furthermore, commercial banks with low asset liquidity engage in regulatory arbitrage to take advantage of the convenience of green bond financing permission to supplement their liquidity. Our results imply that the regulatory arbitrage mechanism is a very important motivation for commercial banks to issue green bonds. To reduce this motivation and ensure the healthy and sustainable development of the green bond market, green ratings of projects should be linked with financing costs as a way to form a positive feedback incentivizing mechanism for green project financers.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper provides a framework for analyzing the interactions among legal environments, incomplete contracts and specialized investments. It is well known that providers of specialized investments may be taken advantage when the contract is incomplete, thus an improvement in legal environments may be able to better protect those specialized asset investors and provide them with stronger incentive for specialized investments hence promote the overall level of specialization of the economy and enhance labor productivity. (1) We use the data set from IEDB (Industrial Enterprises Data Bank) of China to capture this effect. It is found that legal environ -ment improvement does enhance the labor productivity through encouragement of specialization. This effect is robust under different settings in assumptions of endogeneity, heterogeneity and measurements of productivity index. (2) Heterogeneity analysis shows that a bigger market scale does encourage deeper specialization, more specialized investments, and thus improving the labor productivity. (3) The above conclusion holds up not only at the micro (firm) level but also at the macro level of the economy. The labor productivity increase happens with the growth of an industry along with deeper specialization and better legal environments.
查看更多>>摘要：We develop a novel approach to study overeducation by extracting pre-match information from online recruitment platforms using word segmentation and dictionary building techniques, which can offer significant advantages over traditional survey-based approaches in objectiveness, timeliness, sample sizes, area coverage and richness of controls. We apply this method to China, which has experienced a 10-fold expansion of its higher education sector over the last two decades. We find that about half of online job-seekers in China are two or more years overeducated, resulting in 5.1% pay penalty. However, the effect of overeducation on pay varies significantly by college quality, city type, and the match of college major with industry. Graduates in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) or LEM (Law, Economics and Management) from Key Universities are much less likely to be overeducated in the first place, and actually enjoy a significant pay premium even when they are in the situation.
查看更多>>摘要：How does participating or moving to more upstream in the global value chains (GVCs) affect the premium paid to skilled compared to unskilled labor within firms? In this paper, we develop a model of heterogeneous firms with intermediate trade and two skill inputs, in which we apply the fair wage hypothesis to predict the wage premium changes according to firms? GVCs activities. The model predicts that firms? backward GVC participation, as measured by the share of foreign value-added content in exports (FVAR), has an ambiguous impact on wage inequality of skills, which depends on the relative importance of ?FVAR-labor substitution effect? and ?FVAR-profit effect.? However, moving to upstream sectors in GVCs, as measured by the export varieties? upstreamness (or average distance from final use), raises a firm?s wage premium. Using detailed Chinese firm-level data from 2000 to 2006, we develop a Mincer-type empirical model to study the wage premium changes associated with FVAR and upstreamness. We find robust empirical evidence that the rise of wage inequality in China mainly arises from moving to more upstream sectors rather than changing GVC participation.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper studies income inequality in old age and its development over the life cycle. We show that income is more unequally distributed in old age than in working age. We combine the regression-based inequality decomposition method and the three-step mediating effect test to analyze the transmission of income inequality from initial socioeconomic differences to income inequality in old age. Our study is based on a panel of over 4000 old households from the China Health and Nutrition Survey during 1991?2015. We find that the urban-rural gap and educational inequality are the primary causes of old-age income inequality. The effect of the urban-rural gap is partially mediated by educational inequality. Inequality accumulates with age and is reinforced in old age by the fragmented Chinese public pension system.
查看更多>>摘要：Does extreme heat have causal effects on exports? If so, how do the effects evolve? This paper exploits monthly fluctuations in the number of extremely hot days within a city to identify their effects on firm-level exports in that city. We find robust evidence that hot temperatures have persistent adverse effects on firm-level exports. Specifically, export losses gradually arise following a heat shock, beginning from an undetectable impact and eventually accumulating to a large and significant impact. An additional >30 degrees C day in a month could generate cumulative losses up to 0.83% of a firm's annual exports twenty-four months later. The negative effects of extreme heat are mainly through its adverse impacts on the firm's investment, capital, and production output. Capital-intensive sectors and FDI-related enterprises are among the most affected by high temperatures. Our findings support the "no-recovery" hypothesis after weather extremes and have implications for future climate change policies.
查看更多>>摘要：According to Chinese astrology, each lunar year is symbolized by a zodiac animal, including the Dragon, which represents auspiciousness, power and greatness. Based on high-quality administrative data from birth certificates in Shenzhen, China, we first show that a considerable number of births are shifted from one week before the Dragon year to one week after the Dragon year begins, mainly through vaginal and elective C-sections. Then, we estimate the causal health effects of delaying births but do not find any significant results, as measured by birth weight, Apgar scores, and neonatal mortality.
查看更多>>摘要：We identify the impact of expansionary monetary policy in China during the 2008?2009 global financial crisis on the credit and investment allocation among firms. We obtain robust evidence that expansionary monetary policy led to the misallocation of bank credit to less productive firms after controlling for confounding factors. However, we find that investment increased more for more productive firms. Additional analyses show that this occurred partly because more productive firms hoarded cash before the crisis, and partly because less productive firms invested more in financial assets.
NSTL
Elsevier