查看更多>>摘要：Financial constraint is a significant obstacle for firm growth, especially in developing countries where credit is scarce. This paper explores the role of tax policy in relaxing firms' financial constraints by exploiting China's value-added tax (VAT) reform that was initiated in 2004 and completed in 2009. We use a quasi-experimental method and Annual Survey of Industrial Firms (ASIF) data from 2000 to 2009 to estimate the VAT reform's policy effects on financial constraints. We show that the VAT reform significantly improves firms' external financing capacity by decreasing borrowing costs and promoting commercial credit. The findings are robust to alternative specifications but show heterogeneity across ownerships, firm sizes, regions, and between export and non-export firms. Our analysis suggests tax deduction is useful to relax firms' financial constraints.
查看更多>>摘要：This paper studies the impact of home purchase restrictions on China's housing market. We estimate a structural model of household preference for housing, real estate developers' pricing decisions, and equilibrium market outcome in five large cities. By comparing the estimation results from pre-and post-policy intervention, we find that, after home purchase restrictions are implemented, overall housing demand in most cities becomes weaker and less price elastic; meanwhile, real estate developers face higher holding costs and thus are willing to lower prices and sell more quickly. Counterfactual analyses show that in some cities alternative policy designs that cause less structural change of demand could achieve larger consumer welfare and social welfare than the implemented policy.
查看更多>>摘要：Structural transformation is a key feature of economic development. Traditional literature attributes it to changes in the sectoral composition of consumption. Different from it, we argue that "servicification" of investment goods, induced by investment-composition technological change, becomes an increasingly important reason for structural transformation, particularly for the rise of the services economy. Our study of the input output tables finds that the share of service inputs in investment goods has grown significantly in many countries since the 1980s, especially for investment-intensive economies such as China. To assess if the investment channel is quantitatively significant, we build a standard model with three broad sectors, but instead add an investment production function employing factors from all three sectors. Moreover, we incorporate investment-composition technological change by allowing the productivities of the three sectoral inputs to evolve over time. We calibrate the model to the Chinese economy from 1981 to 2014 and perform counter-factual experiments accordingly. We find that investment-composition technological change accounts for 33.1% decline in employment share of agriculture, 36.0% increase in employment share of manufacturing and 31.5% increase in employment share of services over the period. The magnitude of this effect on the share of services keeps growing, particularly after 2000. Our findings are not unique for China, but also apply to other economies experiencing the "servicification" of investment.
查看更多>>摘要：The deferred acceptance mechanism (DA) replaced the Boston mechanism (BM) in college admissions in China. In this paper, I compare the empirical performance of these two mechanisms in the Chinese context by developing an empirical model and applying it to college admissions in Guangxi, Hebei, and Sichuan provinces. Then, I conduct counterfactuals to empirically compare the BM and DA in these three provinces for given years. I find that not only is the BM superior to the DA in terms of total welfare but also that most students receive lower utility after the switch from the BM to DA.
查看更多>>摘要：Resource-rich locations often rely on exporting the resources to prosper, but resource depletion is a matter of time. An industrial transformation is necessary to sustain economic growth when the comparative advantage fades away. This paper concerns the Resource-Exhausted City Transition program, a large-scale place-based policy of the Chinese state government. It applies firm data and examines impacts on industrial development in places suffering from resource-exhaustion. Estimation shows that the program has stimulated capital investment largely and fostered employment and efficiency as well, leading to a boost in output. The program does not favor the resource sector with little comparative advantage. It facilitates an industrial upgrade by extending the value chain towards the downstream and stimulating higher value-add activities. Effects are heterogeneous among firms with different capital intensity, age, size, ownership type, or regions.
NSTL
Elsevier