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The Hidden Cost of Trade Liberalization: Input Tariff Shocks and Worker Health in China

Haichao Fan, Faqin Lin, Shu Lin, Jun 24, 2020

Can intermediate input trade liberalization affect worker health in a developing country like China, and if so, how? Do the impacts differ between skilled and unskilled workers? What are the welfare implications of input tariff reductions once health factors are considered? Professors Haichao Fan of Fudan University, Faqin Lin of China Agricultural University, and Shu Lin of the Chinese University of Hong Kong develop...

Gender-Targeted Job Ads: Patterns, Impacts, and Mechanisms

Peter Kuhn, Kailing Shen, Feb 27, 2019

Gender-targeted job ads are common in many emerging economies. Using data from jobboards—which differ substantially in terms of culture, size, and user groups targeted—our empirical evidence suggests that policies that target workers’ application decisions may be at least as important as policies that target employers’ screening decisions, if not more.

Local Government Implicit Debt and the Pricing of LGFV Bonds

Laura Xiaolei Liu, Yuanzhen Lyu, Fan Yu, Jun 22, 2022

To examine the implicit guarantee provided by Chinese local governments to local government financing vehicles (LGFV), we create a proxy for local governments’ implicit debt ratio and find it correlated with the credit spread of LGFV bonds.

Unequal School Enrollment Rights and Increased Inequality: The Case of Shanghai

Muyang Zhang, Jie Chen, Jan 03, 2018

In Shanghai, housing entitlements with enrollment access to a good public primary school is associated with a 0.1-0.35 percentage point lower annual rental yield. This rental yield gap is the opportunity cost of securing such housing, which is within the affordability range of most middle-income families in Shanghai. This implies that, should there be no credit constraint for homeownership, children from middle-income families should have a higher likelihood of accessing better public education. We find, however, that the enrollment rights between homeowners and renters, together with the credit constraint to own a home, actually lowers the chance of children from middle-income families of attending better public schools relative to those children from families with high initial wealth. This resulting reduced intergeneration mobility exacerbates the social inequality in China.

Share Pledging in China: Funding Listed Firms or Funding Entrepreneurship?

Zhiguo He, Bibo Liu, Feifei Zhu, Jun 01, 2022

Our recent study analyzes the use of share pledging funds in the context of China. Survey evidence shows that a majority of the largest shareholders (67.3%) used pledging funds outside their listed firms, including financing their entrepreneurial activities.