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Human Mobility Restrictions and the Spread of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China

Hanming Fang, Long Wang, Yang Yang, Jun 03, 2020

We provide a rigorous examination of the causal impact of human mobility restrictions, particularly the lockdown of the city of Wuhan on January 23, 2020, on the containment and delay of the spread of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China. We employ various difference-in-differences strategies to disentangle the lockdown effect on human mobility reductions from other confounding effects, including a panic effect, a virus deterrence effect, and a Spring Festival effect...

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.

Misallocation of Managerial Talent in China’s Housing Boom

Yu Shi, Feb 20, 2019

The housing boom in China has raised great concerns about capital and credit misallocation. Recent research by IMF Economist Yu Shi finds that China’s imperfect financial market and regulations in the land market have also led to a misallocation of managerial talent, dampening productivity and growth in the non-real estate sectors. Productive managers in other sectors moved to the real estate sector...

Did the US-China Tariff War Affect China’s Economy? Evidence from Night Lights

Davin Chor, Bingjing Li, Dec 08, 2021

We infer the impact of the US-China tariff war on China’s economy, using high-frequency satellite data on nighttime luminosity. Through a grid-level panel analysis, we find evidence that the US tariffs levied between 2018–2019 on China’s exports had a negative impact on income per capita and manufacturing employment that was very skewed across locations within China. By contrast, China’s retaliatory tariffs on imports from the United States did not have a discernible impact on economic outcomes at the local level.

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.