VoxChina

Latest

Laboratories of Autocracy: The Landscape of Central–Local Dynamics in China’s Policy Universe Feb 25, 2026

The Narrowing Path: Trade and Development in a New Era Feb 11, 2026

Robots as Guardians: How Automation Has Made Chinese Workplaces Safer Feb 03, 2026

When Industrial Policy Meets Comparative Advantage: Lessons from “Made in China 2025” Jan 28, 2026

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

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

Mapping the Contours of Chinese Policy Transmission at Home and Abroad Silvia Miranda-Agrippino, Tsvetelina Nenova, Hélène Rey, Mar 03, 2026 China’s place within international trade networks and global supply chains makes the propagation of Chinese shocks a global phenomenon.

Laboratories of Autocracy: The Landscape of Central–Local Dynamics in China’s Policy Universe Kaicheng Luo, Shaoda Wang, David Yang, Feb 25, 2026 This article shows how individual officials drive innovation, how competition shapes diffusion, and how a post-2013 turn toward central control has reduced local adaptation—often at a real economic cost.

The Narrowing Path: Trade and Development in a New Era Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, Michele Ruta, Feb 11, 2026 International trade will continue to be important for economic performance..

Robots as Guardians: How Automation Has Made Chinese Workplaces Safer Wei Luo, Lixin Tang, Yaxin Yang, Xianqiang Zou, Feb 03, 2026 Industrial robots are often discussed primarily in terms of their employment effects. New evidence from China shows that automation has also delivered substantial improvements in workplace safety, with sharp reductions in accidents and fatalities.

When Industrial Policy Meets Comparative Advantage: Lessons from “Made in China 2025” Xiuping Hua, Yong Wang, Junjie Xia, Haochen Zhang, Jan 28, 2026 In this paper, the authors contribute to this debate through the lens of a novel perspective: the congruence between firm’s factor input structures and local endowment structures.

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...

Recent

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.

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...

Institutional Sponsors

Executive Committee

Advisory Board

Editorial Board