This paper investigates whether competition spurs quality improvement using the entry of Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail (HSR) as an exogenous increase in competition to affected flights to destination cities along the HSR line. We find that competition from the entry of HSR leads to significant reductions in the mean and variance of travel delays on the affected airline routes and that these improvements are mainly driven by reductions in departure delays and the duration of taxi-in time at the destination airport.
Rising import competition from emerging countries such as China, which are increasingly integrated in the global economy, have led to lower labor market opportunities in many high-income countries, especially for middle-class manufacturing workers (see Keller and Utar, 2019). This article shows that the implications of rising import competition go beyond the labor market and also affect family size and structure.
Our recent research finds that provincial credit market development, through improving credit allocation, enhances firms’ product innovation incentives and outcomes in the People’s Republic of China. We further show that firms’ credit constraints and performance are two channels through which credit market development affects the innovative capacities of firms. We suggest that in order to further promote firms’ innovations, China should encourage financial institutions to actively screen those firms who have good performance but face credit constraints.
We document a hierarchy of private owners connected to the state through equity investment and a rapid expansion of this hierarchy over the past two decades. We build a model to show how the effects of a special deal from a state investor can be transmitted and amplified through the hierarchy. Our estimation suggests that the expansion in the span of state-connected private owners may have increased aggregate output of the private sector by 4.2% a year between 2000 and 2019.
Inter-jurisdictional competition in a regionally decentralized authoritarian regime distorts local politicians’ incentives in resource allocation among firms from their own city and a competing city.