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The Economic Toll of China’s Tutoring Ban

Zibin Huang, Yinan Liu, Mingming Ma, Leo Yang Yang, Aug 27, 2025

China's 2021 “Double Reduction'' policy, which banned for-profit K12 academic tutoring, triggered an abrupt contraction in the education-services labor market. Using real-time job-posting and firm-registration data, we estimate over three million job openings lost in four months and at least 11 billion RMB in value-added tax (VAT) revenue losses within 18 months, alongside unintended negative spillovers to untargeted arts and sports training.

Doing Business in China: Parental Background and Government Intervention Determine Who Owns Business

Ruixue Jia, Xiaohuan Lan, Gerard Padró i Miquel, May 19, 2021

The children of cadres have a higher likelihood of owning business in China, and this relationship varies greatly with government intervention in the economy. Connections with government are likely to be the explanation behind this pattern.

China’s New Nationwide CO2 Emissions Trading System: General Equilibrium Impacts

Lawrence H. Goulder, Xianling Long, Chenfei Qu, Da Zhang, Apr 17, 2024

This article discussing the comprehensive impacts of China's newly introduced nationwide CO2 emissions trading system, with a focus on its interactions with environmental costs, the fiscal system, and the challenges faced in policy cost distribution.

Structural Change and the Stability of Aggregate Employment in China

Wen Yao, Xiaodong Zhu, Oct 27, 2021

In developed countries, aggregate employment has a strong positive correlation with aggregate output, and it is almost as volatile as output. In China, the correlation of aggregate employment and output is close to zero, and the volatility of aggregate employment is very low. We argue that the key to understanding the stability of aggregate employment in China is labor reallocation between the agricultural and non-agricultural sectors, and that the declining relative demand...

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumption: Learning from High Frequency Transaction Data

Haiqiang Chen, Wenlan Qian, Qiang Wen, May 26, 2021

Based on daily transaction data in 214 cities and the difference-in-differences method, we document that daily offline consumption fell by 32%, or 18.57 million RMB per city, during the twelve-week period after China’s COVID-19 outbreak in late January 2020. This implies that China’s offline consumption decreased by over 1.22 trillion RMB in the three-month post-outbreak period, or 1.2% of China’s 2019 GDP. Our estimates suggest a significant economic benefit...