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Input Trade Liberalization and Firm Labor Market Power in China

Illenin O. Kondo, Yao Amber Li, Wei Qian, Jul 30, 2025

More trade, more jobs? Or fewer? China’s accession to the WTO has catalyzed a rich research agenda on the labor market consequences of trade liberalization. Departing from the assumptions of perfectly competitive labor markets, we ask whether Chinese firms exercised more or less labor market power when input tariffs fell with China’s WTO accession? We show that input trade liberalization reduced labor monopsony power in China, especially for skill-intensive firms and in markets with more labor supply growth.

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.

Investor Memory and Biased Beliefs: Evidence from the Field

Zhengyang Jiang, Hongqi Liu, Cameron Peng, Hongjun Yan, Aug 20, 2025

We explore how investor memory drives belief formation and trading behavior, fueling financial market volatility. Drawing on surveys of over 17,000 Chinese retail investors linked to trading records, our study finds that recollections of past returns—shaped by both salient market events in the past and current market conditions—strongly influence expectations of future returns and investors’ portfolio choices, often outweighing objective historical data. These findings suggest that memory-driven biases amplify boom-and-bust cycles, with policy implications for improving market stability by counteracting distorted recall.

Monetary Policy in China: A Trade-Off Between Transmission and Stability?

Kaiji Chen, Yiqing Xiao, Tao Zha, Sep 24, 2025

We explore how China’s shift toward interest-rate-based monetary policy faces an inherent trade-off. When non-state banks turn to wholesale funding, monetary policy easing is transmitted more effectively to productive firms, but the banking system also becomes more fragile in economic downturns. Our findings suggest that China’s regulators must strike a careful balance between achieving policy effectiveness and safeguarding financial stability.

Decoupling of Incomes and CO₂ Emissions in China and the US

Chuanzhi Huo, Angqi Li, Prakash Loungani, Jul 23, 2025

Johns Hopkins University. (The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to Johns Hopkins University.)