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Structural Change and the Stability of Aggregate Employment in China

Wen Yao, Xiaodong Zhu, Oct 27, 2021

In developed countries, aggregate employment has a strong positive correlation with aggregate output, and it is almost as volatile as output. In China, the correlation of aggregate employment and output is close to zero, and the volatility of aggregate employment is very low. We argue that the key to understanding the stability of aggregate employment in China is labor reallocation between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors, and that the declining relative demand...

The Economic Impact of Distributing Financial Products on Third-Party Online Platforms

Claire Yurong Hong, Xiaomeng Lu, Jun Pan, Feb 26, 2020

The emergence of third-party online platforms in intermediating financial products has been a new and exciting development in FinTech. We find that, in China post-platform, fund flows become markedly more sensitive to fund performance, and the net flow to the top 10 percent–performing funds more than triples their pre-platform level. In response, fund managers increase their risk taking to enhance...

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumption: Learning from High Frequency Transaction Data

Haiqiang Chen, Wenlan Qian, Qiang Wen, May 26, 2021

Based on daily transaction data in 214 cities and the difference-in-differences method, we document that daily offline consumption fell by 32%, or 18.57 million RMB per city, during the twelve-week period after China’s COVID-19 outbreak in late January 2020. This implies that China’s offline consumption decreased by over 1.22 trillion RMB in the three-month post-outbreak period, or 1.2% of China’s 2019 GDP. Our estimates suggest a significant economic benefit...

Does Import Competition Harm Innovation? Evidence from Firm-level Data in China

Qing Liu, Ruosi Lu, Yi Lu, Tuan Anh Luong, Oct 06, 2021

Twenty years ago, China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO) was a catalyst for its economic development and propelled China into becoming one of the most important economies in the world. But massive import tariff reductions allowed more import competition, which raised concerns that innovation would be curbed. Tuan Luong, from De Montfort University, and his co-authors, Qing Liu, Ruosi Lu, and Yi Lu, discuss the impacts of import competition on domestic innovation...

Regional Variation of GDP per Head within China, 1080–1850: Implications for the Great Divergence Debate

Stephen Broadberry, Hanhui Guan, Sep 28, 2022

We provide the first regional breakdown of GDP per head for China from the Song dynasty to the Qing, so that regions of similar size can be compared between Europe and Asia to establish the timing of the Great Divergence of living standards.