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Human-Capital Externalities in China

Edward L. Glaeser, Ming Lu, Oct 10, 2024

This paper provides evidence of heterogeneous human-capital externality using CHIP 2002, 2007, and 2013 data from urban China. After instrumenting city-level education using the number of relocated university departments across cities in the 1950s, one additional year of city-level education increases individual hourly wages by 22.0 percent, more than twice the OLS estimate. Human-capital externality is greater for all groups of urban residents in the instrumental variables estimation.

English Language Requirements and Educational Inequality in China

Hongbin Li, Lingsheng Meng, Kai Mu, Shaoda Wang, May 29, 2024

The introduction of the English listening test in the NCEE has exacerbated educational inequality between urban and rural areas in China, thereby affecting the college admission prospects and future income of rural students.

The Long-term Persistence of Informal Finance in China

Jinyan Hu, Chicheng Ma, Bo Zhang, Jan 24, 2018

By using data on 137 counties in north China, we find that the density of financial institutions (Qianzhuang and Diandang) in the late Qing period has a significant positive effect on the number and total assets of small loan companies, a dominant institution of informal finance today. The persistent effect of historical financial institutions can be explained by Confucian culture, which instills integrity, lineage solidarity and acquaintance networks.

Overpricing in China’s Corporate Bond Market

Yi Ding, Wei Xiong, Jinfan Zhang, Nov 27, 2019

In China’s corporate bond market, the yield spread of newly issued bonds at their first secondary-market trade is on average 5.35 bps higher than the issuance spread. This overpricing is robust across bond issuances with different credit ratings, maturities, issuance types, and issuer status. Evidence suggests that competition among underwriters drives this overpricing through two specific channels—either through rebates to participants in issuance auctions or through direct auction bidding by the underwriters for themselves or their clients.

Does VAT Have Higher Tax Compliance Than a Turnover Tax? Evidence from China

Jianjun Li, Xuan Wang, Jan 15, 2020

We study the effects of compliance with the value-added tax (VAT) by exploiting the reform that replaced business tax (BT) with VAT in China beginning in 2012. We find that replacing the BT with VAT significantly increases the reported sales and costs for treated firms, and the impact is much stronger for business-to-business (B2B) transactions than for business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. Buyers in B2B transactions...