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How Do Workers and Households Adjust to Robots?

Osea Giuntella, Yi Lu, Tianyi Wang, Apr 26, 2023

We analyze the effects of exposure to industrial robots on labor markets and household behaviors, exploring longitudinal household data from the China Family Panel Studies.

Brain Drain to the State Sector: Job Preferences and Outcomes for China’s College Graduates

Hongbin Li, Lingsheng Meng, Yanyan Xiong, Sinclair Cook, Feb 28, 2024

Despite private enterprises dominating China’s labor market, college-educated workers are still highly concentrated in the state sector. Using data from the Chinese College Student Survey, we find that 64% of students in the sample expressed a strong preference for state-sector employment.

Can Investment Incentives Crowd Out Innovation? Evidence from China

Shaowei Ke, Yao Lu, Xinzheng Shi, Yeqing Zhang, Nov 06, 2019

The Chinese government has been using strong fiscal stimuli to encourage investment. While these fiscal policies, such as investment tax credits, often encourage firm investment, we find that investment tax incentives may generate an unintended reduction of firms’ innovation. Moreover, the crowding-out effect is non-monotonic in the level of financial constraints.

Does China’s Place-Based Land Policy Lead to Spatial Misallocation?

Min Fang, Libin Han, Zibin Huang, Ming Lu, Li Zhang, Nov 17, 2021

After 2003, the Chinese central government implemented an inland-favoring land supply policy that distributed more construction land quotas to underdeveloped non-eastern regions. We investigate the effect of the policy and find that it drastically increased land and housing prices in more-developed eastern regions, which consequently created substantial spatial misallocation of land and labor. The policy seems to reduce regional output gaps; however, it hurt...

GDP Management to Meet or Beat Growth Targets

Changjiang Lyu, Kemin Wang, Frank Zhang, Xin Zhang, Oct 24, 2018

We apply the discontinuity methodology from the accounting literature to a political economy setting of GDP reporting and examine whether Chinese local governments manage regional GDP numbers. We find strong evidence of discontinuities around zero in the distribution of actual minus target GDP growth rates. The frequencies of just meeting or beating GDP growth targets are about five (four) times the frequencies of just missing targets at the prefecture (province) level. The results are stronger for governors with longer tenures and those without political connections to higher-level officials as well as for local governments with more resources under their control.