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Employment Protection and Corporate Cash Holdings: Evidence from China’s Labor Contract Law

Chenyu Cui, Kose John, Jiaren Pang, Haibin Wu, Oct 13, 2021

We examine whether and how employment protection influences corporate cash holdings using Chinese firm-level data. Our empirical results show that labor-intensive firms in China significantly increased their cash holdings following the enactment of China’s Labor Contract Law. Further analyses suggest that the results are generally consistent with a “labor adjustment costs” channel: employment protection...

Trade Policy Uncertainty and New Firm Entry: Evidence from China

Chuantao Cui, Leona Shao Zhi Li, Sep 20, 2023

Exploiting China’s WTO accession as a quasi-natural experiment, this study finds that reduced trade policy uncertainty (TPU) in a major destination market promotes domestic entrepreneurial activities in China

Financing Micro-entrepreneurship in Online Crowdfunding Markets: Local Preference versus Information Frictions

Jian Ni, Yi Xin, Sep 30, 2020

Crowdfunding has become an important financing alternative for micro-entrepreneurship. We study to what extent bias toward local entrepreneurs is prevalent in crowdfunding markets, determine the main driving forces for such bias, and examine how crowdfunding platforms and policymakers can leverage these forces to stimulate micro-entrepreneurship. Even though online crowdfunding platforms are designed to overcome geographic barriers, we find evidence of strong local bias induced by both informational frictions and local preference, with the former being more important.

Picking Winners? Government Subsidies and Firm Productivity in China

Lee G. Branstetter, Guangwei Li, Mengjia Ren, Jun 21, 2023

We investigate the relationship between the allocation of government subsidies and total factor productivity for Chinese listed firms.

China’s New Goal for Income Distribution: What Does it Mean and are There Tradeoffs?

Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, Mar 16, 2022

China’s political leadership recently committed to expanding the proportion of middle-income groups to create a less polarised, and more ‘olive-shaped’, distribution of wealth. This column considers the potential trade-offs between reducing income polarisation and other goals, including poverty reduction.