A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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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, 2021We 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...
Sex and the City: Demographics, Spatial Sorting, and the Marriage Market
Min Fang, Zibin Huang, Yushi Wang, Yu Alan Yang, Apr 28, 2026China'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.
Good Finance, Bad Finance, and Resource Misallocation: Evidence from China
Jiapin Deng, Qiao Liu, Apr 03, 2024The development of finance driven by Chinese local governments exacerbates the problem of resource misallocation, whereas market-driven finance significantly improves allocative efficiency. This highlights the policy implication that modern finance in China should prioritize the efficient utilization of resources rather than mere expansion in scale.
Structural Change and the Stability of Aggregate Employment in China
Wen Yao, Xiaodong Zhu, Oct 27, 2021In 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...
Exporting out of Agriculture: The Effects of the China Shock in China
Jessica Leight, Jan 01, 2020This paper analyzes the effect of China's 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization on structural transformation at the local level, exploiting cross-sectional variation in tariff uncertainty faced by county economies pre-2001. Using a new panel of 1,800 Chinese counties from 1996 to 2013, we find that counties more exposed to the reduction in tariff uncertainty post-accession are characterized by increasing exports...
