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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.
“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”: Evidence of Directed Search from a Field Experiment
Haoran He, David Neumark, Qian Weng, Jun 16, 2021We explore the impact of wage offers on job applications, testing implications of the directed search model and trying to distinguish it from random search. We use a field experiment conducted on an online Chinese job board, with real jobs for which we randomly varied the wage offers across three ranges. We find that higher wage offers raise application rates overall, which is consistent with directed search...
How Do Public Pensions Affect Eldercare Mode and Son Preference? An Empirical Study on the New Rural Pension Scheme in China
Naijia Guo, Wei Huang, Ruixin Wang, Dec 11, 2024How do public pension schemes reshape eldercare and social norms with son preference? Using variations in the timing of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) across rural Chinese counties..
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.
