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Market Expanding or Market Stealing? Competition with Network Effects in Bike-Sharing
Guangyu Cao, Ginger Zhe Jin, Xi Weng, Li-An Zhou, Jan 16, 2019Positive network effects may lead to winner-takes-all in some markets. The column analyses dockless bike-sharing in China to show instead how an incumbent can benefit from positive spillovers from a competitor’s entry. In the case of bike-sharing, consumers multi-home, the market exhibits positive network effects, and investment by two firms is more cost-efficient than investment by one.
Tax Policy and Lumpy Investment Behavior: Evidence from China’s VAT Reform
Zhao Chen, Xian Jiang, Zhikuo Liu, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato, Daniel Yi Xu, Apr 01, 2020To stimulate investment and promote production efficiency, the Chinese government has undertaken a series of value-added tax (VAT) reforms. One of those reforms, in 2009, reduced not only the purchasing price of equipment, but also investment frictions, i.e., the price gap imposed by the pre-reform VAT system between new and used equipment. We find that this reform increased equipment investment by 36%...
Taking Stock of Trade Policy Uncertainty: Evidence from China’s Pre-WTO Accession
George Alessandria, Shafaat Khan, Armen Khederlarian, Dec 04, 2019We propose a method to estimate the perceived likelihood of an uncertain increase in tariffs using the rise in trade flows in advance of the uncertainty resolution. We apply this framework to the uncertainty surrounding the U.S.’s annual renewal of China’s most-favored-nation (MFN) status in the 1990s. By matching the observed rise in imports in advance of U.S. Congress votes on the renewal, we find that the probability...
The Impact of Rapid Aging and Pension Reform on Savings and the Labor Supply: the Case of China
Hui He, Lei Ning, Dongming Zhu, Jun 26, 2019Individuals can use savings and labor supply to self-insure against uncertainties over their life cycle, such as idiosyncratic income shocks and changes in longevity and pension benefits. Using China as a case study, we investigate, both empirically and quantitatively, the impact of rapid aging and pension reform on savings and the labor supply, and the roles...
Anxiety or Pain? The Impact of Tariffs and Uncertainty on Chinese Firms in the Trade War
Felipe Benguria, Jaerim Choi, Deborah Swenson, Mingzhi Xu, Nov 04, 2020We analyze the firm-level impacts of the US-China trade war since it is of great economic importance to understand how the unprecedented and dramatic increases in the import and export tariffs confronting Chinese firms affected the firm-level policy environment and firm operational outcomes. To contribute to this effort, we study how increases in US tariffs and Chinese retaliatory tariffs raised Chinese firms’ trade policy...
