A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Estimating China’s Growth Potential from Its Global Value Chain Position
Dazhong Cheng, Jian Wang, Zhiguo Xiao, Mar 04, 2020We 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...
“Golden Ages”: A Tale of the Labor Markets in China and the United States
Hanming Fang, Xincheng Qiu, Dec 15, 2021We examine the Chinese growth experience in the last three decades through the lens of the labor market, focusing on evolving cross-sectional earnings distributions. We contrast the Chinese labor market with that of the United States and provide an interesting tale of the two labor markets over the last 30 years.
Human Mobility Restrictions and the Spread of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China
Hanming Fang, Long Wang, Yang Yang, Jun 03, 2020We 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...
Housing Booms and Shirking
Quanlin Gu, Jia He, Wenlan Qian, Oct 03, 2018Our research studies the incentive costs of China’s housing booms . We use the type and actual time stamps of 9.3 million credit card transactions by over 200,000 cardholders to detect non-work-related behavior during work hours. Employees respond to positive house price shocks with an immediate and permanent increase in their propensity to use work hours to attend to personal needs. Our estimate implies an elasticity of shirking propensity with respect to house price of 1.6. The effect is driven by homeowners, especially among owners with higher housing wealth. Further analyses point to negative productivity implications of the increased shirking.
Improving State Effectiveness by Discouraging Civil Servants from Flattering Their Leaders
Alain de Janvry, Guojun He, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Shaoda Wang, Qiong Zhang, Mar 11, 2020Evaluation 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.
