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The Impact of Corporate Taxes on Firm Innovation: Evidence from the Corporate Tax Collection Reform in China

Jing Cai, Yuyu Chen, Xuan Wang, Dec 19, 2018

We explore a tax reform on manufacturing firms in China in order to study the impact of taxes on firm innovation. The reform switched corporate income tax collection from a local to state tax bureau and reduced the effective tax rate by 10 percent. The reform only applied to firms established after January 2002, allowing us to use a regression...

Improving State Effectiveness by Discouraging Civil Servants from Flattering Their Leaders

Alain de Janvry, Guojun He, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Shaoda Wang, Qiong Zhang, Mar 11, 2020

Evaluation of public employees performance is essential to induce higher work efforts. We use an experiment in two provinces of china to explore how to design such evaluation. Results show that the incentive effect of evaluation can be larger if the employee does not know ex-ante who the evaluator will be, thus reducing attempts at personally influencing the evaluator and enhancing instead job achievements.

The Effect of Pollution and Heat on the Productivity of High-Skill Public Sector Workers in China

Matthew E. Kahn, Pei Li, May 22, 2019

The quality of governance depends on public sector worker productivity. We use micro data from China to document that judges are less productive on polluted days. We find that public sector productivity elasticities are larger than the published estimates of private sector productivity elasticities with respect to pollution.

Estimating China’s Growth Potential from Its Global Value Chain Position

Dazhong Cheng, Jian Wang, Zhiguo Xiao, Mar 04, 2020

We find that China’s potential growth in GDP per capita is substantially underestimated if the level of GDP per capita is employed as the convergence indicator as done in previous studies (e.g., Barro, 2015 and 2016). Using data on China’s position in the global value chain (GVC) prior to 2010, we predict that the country’s GDP per capita could have grown at 7%–8% annually between 2010 and 2015, which is closer...

FinTech Adoption and Household Risk-Taking

Claire Yurong Hong, Xiaomeng Lu, Jun Pan, Dec 16, 2020

China has experienced a rapid increase in FinTech penetration in the form of offline digital payments over the past decade. Using unique account-level data on consumption, investments, and FinTech usage from the Ant Group, we find that FinTech can lower investment barriers and help households move toward optimal risk-taking. Inferring individuals’ risk tolerance from their consumption volatility, we find that individuals who are more risk tolerant benefit more from FinTech advancement. Examining the enhancement...