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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...

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...

The Impact of Health Insurance on the Wellbeing of Older Chinese

Sisi Yang, Katja Hanewald, Aug 12, 2020

Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2011, 2013 and 2015, we analyze whether the universal health insurance system in China increases the life satisfaction of middle-aged and older adults and to what extent the type of health insurance affects their life satisfaction. We find that the life satisfaction of middle-aged and older adults does not depend on having any health insurance...

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.

Feedback Trading and the Chinese Put Warrants Bubble

Neil D. Pearson, Zhishu Yang, Qi Zhang, Jul 27, 2022

There was a bubble in the prices of put warrants traded on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges during the summer of 2007. We use investor trading records from a large securities firm to show that put warrant investors engaged in a particular form of feedback trading. This feedback trading exacerbated an initial run-up in put warrant prices caused by a change in the stock transaction tax, and created the bubble.