Rural households in China have experienced a steadily increasing rise in their real income over the last twenty years as economic reforms have revitalized this sector. Analyzing an unusual natural experiment generated by an increase in prices paid for mandatory grain procurement in China post-1993, I seek to provide evidence around how an increase in permanent income affects households’ production portfolio. Evidence suggests that households experiencing positive income shocks substitute away from agricultural production and are more likely to migrate and to invest in non-agricultural production. They also increase their observed levels of borrowing and non-staple consumption.
Our research shows that rural Chinese women's labor supply falls for one year following the birth of a daughter before returning to pre-birth levels while the negative impact of a son on women's labor supply is larger and persists for four years. Furthermore, there is a decrease in household cigarette consumption, and an increase in the mother's probability of being in school, her leisure time, and her participation in...
We find that capital import has a substantially larger productivity effect than intermediates import, by generating significant long-term productivity gains through R&D-capital synergy, R&D-inducing, and direct dynamic productivity effects. Our findings highlight the importance of tariff structure in tariff liberalization: the change in tariff structure explains 18% of the productivity gains following China’s WTO accession.
In this paper, we find that the introduction of specialized bankruptcy courts, which are run by better-trained judges and subject to less government intervention, reduces the cost of bond financing by around 10%.
China is aiming to become a technological innovation powerhouse by 2050, with Premier Li Keqiang recently announcing an increase in R&D investments by 7% for the next five years. But greater R&D investment is no guarantee of success. This column examines the effects of R&D investments by Chinese firms on aggregate productivity and growth.