We use a randomized information intervention to shed light on whether poor understanding of social insurance—in terms of both the enrollment process and the associated costs and benefits—drives the relatively low rates of participation in urban health insurance and pension programs among China's rural-urban migrants. Among workers without a contract...
China’s 2009 stimulus presents an ideal case for exploring the impacts of monetary-fiscal interaction on credit allocation and investment. During this stimulus period, monetary stimulus itself did not favor SOEs over non-SOEs in credit access. Fiscal expansion, however, enhanced the monetary transmission to bank credit that was allocated to local government financing vehicles...
We investigate the impact of external monitoring from the government on state-owned enterprise performance, using the variation in monitoring strength arising from a nationwide policy change and firms’ geographic location in China. We utilize a structural approach to estimate input prices and productivity separately at the firm level using commonly available production data. We show that...
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.
The article discusses how capital accumulation has driven China's transition towards capital-intensive industries, while labor-biased productivity growth has helped China maintain a competitive edge in labor-intensive sectors.