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Employee Output Response to Stock Market Wealth Shocks

Teng Li, Wenlan Qian, Wei A. Xiong, Xin Zou, Sep 27, 2023

Exploiting individual-level data linking worker performance and stock investment, we show that a 10% increase in stock investment returns is associated with a decrease in the same investor’s work output by 3.8% in the following month.

Pricing the Priceless: The Financing Cost of Biodiversity Conservation

Fukang Chen, Minhao Chen, Lin William Cong, Haoyu Gao, Jacopo Ponticelli, Feb 26, 2025

This study investigates the pricing of financial risks associated with biodiversity conservation, with a particular focus on the Green Shield Action, a major regulatory initiative launched in China in 2017 to enforce biodiversity preservation rules in national nature reserves. While the initiative improved biodiversity, it also significantly increased bond yields for municipalities that are home to these reserves, effectively raising the general cost of public capital. These effects were primarily driven by heightened default risks plausibly caused by transition costs from shutting down illegal economic activities within the reserves and additional public spending on biodiversity conservation, even when local governments raise the same amount of money. Furthermore, the study reveals that the biological benefits of these conservation policies were not adequately recognized or impounded into the prices by the capital markets.

Input-Trade Liberalization, Female Skill Intensity, and Fertility in China

Feng Chen, Renliang Liu, Miaojie Yu, Apr 09, 2025

The interplay between trade liberalization and demographic behavior illuminates the challenges of reconciling career and family. This paper examines how gender-specific trade liberalization influences fertility, leveraging a Bartik-style shift-share instrumental variable strategy that incorporates female skill intensity into input tariff exposure. We find that input-trade liberalization significantly reduces fertility, particularly among highly educated women, private sector employees, and first-time mothers—groups experiencing the steepest career-family trade-offs. Mechanism analysis shows that enhanced labor market prospects raise the opportunity cost of childbearing, delaying or reducing family formation. These findings underscore the socioeconomic implications of trade policy for demographic trends.

Environmental Externalities, Product Attributes, and Market Power: Implications for Government Subsidies

Panle Jia Barwick, Hyuk-soo Kwon, Shanjun Li, Sep 18, 2024

The article discusses how attribute-based subsidy (ABS) designs lead to higher product quality and more effectively mitigate market power than uniform subsidies, albeit with a modest environmental cost.

Increasing government transparency reduced pollution violations and improved air quality in China

Mengdi Liu, Mark Buntaine, Sarah Anderson, Bing Zhang, Sep 03, 2025

Government transparency helps bridge gaps between environmental laws and actual practices, improving health and environmental quality broadly.