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Sex and the City: Demographics, Spatial Sorting, and the Marriage Market

Min Fang, Zibin Huang, Yushi Wang, Yu Alan Yang, Apr 28, 2026

China's falling marriage rate reflects a fundamental spatial mismatch: as highly educated women sort into big cities with larger service sectors and less educated men concentrate in poorer regions, persistent hypergamous norms leave both groups without suitable local partners.

The Impact of Intranational Trade Barriers on Exports: Evidence from a Nationwide VAT Rebate Reform in China

Jie Bai, Jiahua Liu, Feb 19, 2020

It is well known that various forms of non-tariff trade barriers exist within a country. Empirically, it is difficult to measure these barriers as they can take many forms. We take advantage of a nationwide VAT rebate policy reform in China as a natural experiment to identify the existence of these intranational barriers due to local protectionism and study the impact...

The Value of Childhood Vaccination in China

Hamid Reza Oskorouchi, Alfonso Sousa-Poza, David Bloom, Sep 09, 2020

Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) we estimated the effect of childhood vaccination on later-life schooling and cognitive abilities of elderly Chinese. We found that being vaccinated in childhood increases schooling by one year and improves numeracy and episodic memory scores by 6 percent on average. These encouraging results confirm the powerful and long-lasting benefits of childhood vaccination.

Throwing Good Money after Bad: Zombie Lending and the Supply Chain Contagion of Firm Exit

Yun Dai, Xuchao Li, Dinghua Liu, Jiankun Lu, Jan 19, 2022

Zombie lending to downstream firms does not reduce the exit likelihood of upstream firms. Worse, it distorts efficiency-based firm exit in upstream industries. The exit distortion effect works through the trade credit chain and is more profound in industries with stricter financial constraints and tighter supply chain connections

A Biological Clock Explanation for the Gender Gap in Earnings: Import Competition Increases Female Fertility

Wolfgang Keller, Hâle Utar, Apr 15, 2020

Rising import competition from emerging countries such as China, which are increasingly integrated in the global economy, have led to lower labor market opportunities in many high-income countries, especially for middle-class manufacturing workers (see Keller and Utar, 2019). This article shows that the implications of rising import competition go beyond the labor market and also affect family size and structure.