A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Window Dressing in the Public Sector: Evidence from China’s Compulsory Education Promotion Program
Hanming Fang, Chang Liu, Li-An Zhou, Nov 15, 2023We document public-sector window dressing behavior in China’s Compulsory Education Promotion Program during the 1990s. Window-dressing behavior has been well-documented in various organizations when an agent faces high-stakes incentives.
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.
Growing Apart: Declining Within- and Across-Village Risk Sharing in Rural China
Orazio Attanasio, Costas Meghir, Corina Mommaerts, and Yu Zheng , May 25, 2022China has embarked on an ambitious campaign to close income gaps, address regional inequality and unfair social welfare provision, and make solid progress toward common prosperity by 2035. This marks a shift in focus from overall growth to promoting equitable and balanced growth.
What Gets Measured Gets Managed: Investment and the Cost of Capital
Zhiguo He, Guanmin Liao, Baolian Wang, Aug 09, 2023To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010, Chinese regulators switched from using return on equity to economic value added (EVA).
Employee Output Response to Stock Market Wealth Shocks
Teng Li, Wenlan Qian, Wei A. Xiong, Xin Zou, Sep 27, 2023Exploiting 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.
