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Input-Trade Liberalization, Female Skill Intensity, and Fertility in China
Feng Chen, Renliang Liu, Miaojie Yu, Apr 09, 2025The 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.
High-Speed Rail and China's Electric Vehicle Adoption Miracle
Hanming Fang, Ming Li, Long Wang, Yang Yang, Mar 19, 2025We investigate whether high-speed rail (HSR) connectivity influences electric vehicle (EV) adoption, using a quasi-natural experiment from China’s HSR expansion and several identification strategies. Our findings consistently show that, by alleviating range anxiety, the expansion of HSR can account for up to one third of the increase in EV market share and EV sales in China during our sample period from 2010 to 2023, with effects particularly pronounced in cities served by faster HSR lines. These results suggest that transportation infrastructure can play a complementary role in accelerating the transition to electric mobility.
How Rural Pensions Boosted China's Economy
Qingen Gai, Naijia Guo, Bingjing Li, Qinghua Shi, Xiaodong Zhu, Dec 31, 2025China’s New Rural Pension Scheme unexpectedly lowered the high cost of migration by freeing younger workers from household duties – boosting migration, wages, household welfare, and even national GDP.
Returnees and Innovation: Evidence from Chinese Publicly Listed Firms
Yibo Qiao, Andrea Ascani, Stefano Breschi, Andrea Morrison, May 28, 2025We investigate the relationship between high-skill returnees and innovation of Chinese publicly listed firms. To this aim, we construct a unique dataset of 2,499 firms over the period 2002–2016 by combining three different data sources (i.e. CNRDS, CSMAR, and LinkedIn). Our results show that different typologies of returnees (employees, technologists, and managers) with different experiences abroad (work versus study) may bring back different skills and impact differently on firm innovation.
VoxChina Covid-19 Forum (First Edition): Public Health and Public Policy
VoxChina, Apr 11, 2020Covid-19 poses unprecedented challenges to the global health and global economy. We are pleased to initiate a series of Covid-19 Public Health and Public Policy Virtual Forums to discuss the impact and policy responses to Covid-19.
