A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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China’s New Goal for Income Distribution: What Does it Mean and are There Tradeoffs?
Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, Mar 16, 2022China’s political leadership recently committed to expanding the proportion of middle-income groups to create a less polarised, and more ‘olive-shaped’, distribution of wealth. This column considers the potential trade-offs between reducing income polarisation and other goals, including poverty reduction.
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.
Microgiving with Digital Platforms
Xiheng Jiang, Jianwei Xing, Jintao Xu, Eric Zou, Nov 30, 2022“Microgiving,” a new model of fundraising made possible by digital technologies, is premised on the notion that charities can raise substantial funds by soliciting minuscule donations from many individuals.
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.
