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From Rural Schools to City Factories: Assessing the Quality of Chinese Rural Schools Jan 21, 2026

Learning by Trading: How Reforming Trade Policy Boosted Firm Productivity in China Jan 14, 2026

High-Speed Rail and Local Agricultural Development Jan 07, 2026

新年寄语 | 熊伟教授：VoxChina 以创新星火，答时代之问 Jan 01, 2026

How Rural Pensions Boosted China's Economy Dec 31, 2025

2025年度回顾 | 快来pick今年您最爱的VoxChina研究话题！ Dec 26, 2025

Integrating Jurisdictions, Dividing Workers: Consolidation, Labor Markets, and the Migrant-Local Wage Gap in China Dec 24, 2025

VoxChina | 政策隐性成本：产业补贴为何会引发贸易报复？ Dec 19, 2025

The Rise of China as an International Lender Dec 16, 2025

How Do New Firms Shape Regional Economic Growth in China? Dec 09, 2025

VoxChina | 进口关税下降如何削弱企业“用工垄断力”？ Dec 05, 2025

Why Are So Many Young Women Moving to China’s Big Cities? Dec 03, 2025

Government reform and innovation performance in China Nov 26, 2025

Rural-Urban Migration and Market Integration Nov 19, 2025

VoxChina | 贸易不确定性降低，如何触发企业“创业潮”? Oct 31, 2025

VoxChina | 解码“她经济”：一个关于选择与权衡的时代新命题 Oct 01, 2025

VoxChina | 不可忽视的“她力量”：包容性发展的新答卷 Sep 12, 2025

VoxChina | 基金净值涨了，基民们的钱包却瘪了？ Aug 15, 2025

From Rural Schools to City Factories: Assessing the Quality of Chinese Rural Schools Eric A. Hanushek, Le Kang, Xueying Li, Lei Zhang, Jan 21, 2026 Rural school quality is low and varies significantly across provinces. We estimate provincial variations in school quality from the labor market returns to years of schooling of interprovincial rural migrants educated in different home provinces but working in the same urban labor market. School quality is higher and provincial variation is lower for younger cohorts, indicating at least partial effectiveness of recent policies aimed at improving the quality of rural schools.

Learning by Trading: How Reforming Trade Policy Boosted Firm Productivity in China Yunong Li, Yi Lu, Jianguo Wang, Jan 14, 2026 In China, granting firms the right to trade internationally boosted productivity, with gains growing over time and shared with workers through higher wages.

High-Speed Rail and Local Agricultural Development Xiaoguang Chen, Binlei Gong, Zhilong Qin, Xiaoli Wang, Jan 07, 2026 We study China’s extensive high-speed rail (HSR) expansions to address a key policy concern that large-scale transport infrastructure may undermine agriculture and food security. We find that HSR expansion facilitates the outflow of labor and land from agriculture, yet does not reduce agricultural output because productivity rises.

How Rural Pensions Boosted China's Economy Qingen Gai, Naijia Guo, Bingjing Li, Qinghua Shi, Xiaodong Zhu, Dec 31, 2025 China’s New Rural Pension Scheme unexpectedly lowered the high cost of migration by freeing younger workers from household duties – boosting migration, wages, household welfare, and even national GDP.

Integrating Jurisdictions, Dividing Workers: Consolidation, Labor Markets, and the Migrant-Local Wage Gap in China Shiyu Bo, Yi Wang, Dec 24, 2025 We examine how China’s recent wave of city-county mergers reshaped local labor markets. Using individual-level data from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey and a staggered difference-in-differences approach, we find that the reform boosted wages by strengthening local economies and improving governance...

The Rise of China as an International Lender Zhengyang Jiang, Dec 16, 2025 In the past decade, China has become the largest creditor to developing countries, surpassing the IMF, World Bank, and Paris Club countries. This column discusses how China's overseas lending interacts with US monetary policy – another key driver of the global financial cycle. It finds that Chinese and US policies jointly influence the level and the distribution of risk exposures in developing countries. As a result of China's expanding role in international lending, the architecture of global financial intermediation is also undergoing a fundamental transformation, carrying important implications for the stability and functioning of the international monetary system.

How Do New Firms Shape Regional Economic Growth in China? Loren Brandt, Gueorgui Kambourov, Kjetil Storesletten, Dec 09, 2025 Barriers to entry facing new firms are a major source of regional economic differences. Removing these barriers can play an important role in economic convergence and growth.

Why Are So Many Young Women Moving to China’s Big Cities? Yumi Koh, Jing Li, Yifan Wu, Junjian Yi, Hanzhe Zhang, Dec 03, 2025 It’s not just about jobs. It’s also about love, status, and the marriage market.

Government reform and innovation performance in China Min Zhang, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Nov 26, 2025 This column exploits the staggered implementation of government agency reforms in China to examine the impact of institutions on innovation. It finds that the regions which pioneered these reforms have reaped the rewards of reduced bureaucratic friction and enhanced regulatory efficiency, manifesting in marked gains in innovation performance. The dividends of institutional reform are most pronounced in city-regions already endowed with robust innovation infrastructure and intellectual capital.

Rural-Urban Migration and Market Integration Dennis Egger, Benjamin Faber, Ming Li, Wei Lin, Nov 19, 2025 Reductions in rural-to-urban migration barriers have led to economic gains for both rural origins and urban destinations by reducing information frictions and facilitating the flow of goods and investments between cities and the countryside.

Recent

How Liberalizing Trade with China Led to a Boom in International Students in the US Gaurav Khanna, Kevin Shih, Ariel Weinberger, Mingzhi Xu, Miaojie Yu, Aug 16, 2023 Focusing on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, we show that Chinese cities with more exposure to trade liberalization sent more students to US universities.

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.

Combating Cross-Border Externalities Shiyi Chen, Joshua Graff-Zivin, Huanhuan Wang, Jiaxin Xiong, Sep 21, 2022 China implemented a pioneering policy in 2011, the Ecological Compensation Initiative (ECI), which establishes side payments between upstream and downstream provinces in the Xin’an River Basin.

Assessing and Addressing the Coronavirus-Induced Economic Crisis: Evidence from 1.5 Billion Sales Invoice Zhuo Chen, Pengfei Li, Li Liao, Zhengwei Wang, Aug 31, 2022 We probe the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent containment policies on business activities in China by exploiting big data on 1.5 billion sales invoices. The average drop in sales was between 23% and 35%, depending on firm size, for the 12-week period after the Wuhan lockdown.

Industrial Land Discount in China: A Public Finance Perspective Zhiguo He, Scott Nelson, Yang Su, Anthony Lee Zhang, Fudong Zhang, Jul 25, 2022 Local governments, which serve as monopolistic land sellers in China, face a trade-off when deciding to supply residential land versus industrial land. This trade-off is determined by the different time profiles of revenues from industrial and residential land sales, local governments’ financial constraints, and the extent of local governments’ tax revenue sharing with other levels of government.

Dollar Funding Stresses in China Laura Kodres, Leslie Sheng Shen, Darrell Duffie, Jul 13, 2022 The need for US dollar funding during the financial stresses of March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic shocked markets, was evident in a number of countries (Avdjiev, Eren, and McGuire 2020; Bahaj and Reis 2020).

Serial Entrepreneurship in China Loren Brandt, Ruochen Dai, Gueorgui Kambourov, Kjetil Storesletten, Xiaobo Zhang, Jul 06, 2022 New firms have been an important engine of growth in the Chinese economy (Brandt, Van Biesebroeck, and Zhang 2012). Drawing on data on the universe of all firms in China, we study entrepreneurship and the creation of new firms in China through the lens of entrepreneurs who operate a series of firms over their lifetime, i.e., serial entrepreneurs (SE).

An Empirical Overview of Chinese Capital Market Grace Xing Hu, Jun Pan, Jiang Wang, Jun 29, 2022 We provide an empirical review of the Chinese capital market, focusing on the basic return and risk characteristics of its major asset classes, as well as a comparison to the US market. All major asset classes in China have significant higher volatilities than their counterparts in the US market, but they do not always yield larger returns. Small-company stocks, short-, medium-, and long-term treasury bonds outperform their US counterparts, while large stocks underperform and long-term enterprise bonds yield similar returns.

Mapping U.S.-China Technology Decoupling, Innovation, and Firm Performance Pengfei Han, Wei Jiang, Danqing Mei, Dec 01, 2021 We develop measures for technology decoupling and dependence between the U.S. and China based on combined patent data. The first two decades of the century witnessed a steady increase in technology integration (or less decoupling), but China’s dependence on the U.S. increased (decreased) during the first (second) decade. Decoupling in a technology field predicts China’s growing dependence on U.S. technology, which, in turn, predicts less decoupling further down the road...

School Enrollment Restriction on Migrant Children and Human Capital Losses Zibin Huang, Nov 24, 2021 In China, migrant children are at a disadvantaged and sometimes cannot enroll in public schools in migration destinations due to policy restrictions. Some migrant workers then have to leave their children behind in their hometowns, which causes the left-behind children problem. This study finds that if the enrollment restriction on migrant children is relaxed, migration of parents and children will increase, and the average human capital in the society will also increase. Low-skill families from small cities benefit most.

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