Will robots replace workers? Lessons from China
Osea Giuntella, Yi Lu, Tianyi Wang, Aug 06,
2025
Robot adoption has skyrocketed in China in the last decade. New research finds that this exposure has led to a decline in employment and wages, influencing workers’ training and retirement decisions. How can developing countries prepare themselves for the artificial intelligence revolution?
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.
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.)
Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Uneven Impact of Land Reform
Ting Chen, Jiajia Gu, Rachel Ngai, Jin Wang, Jul 16,
2025
Land market frictions due to incomplete property rights are a major form of mobility barrier in many developing countries, where rural households risk losing land if they stop cultivating it. This implicit barrier is made explicit through China’s Hukou system. Using two land reforms that reduce these barriers, we construct a novel county-level reform index and argue that these reforms have contributed to improvement in agricultural productivity and have uneven impact across gender. They improve rural women’s transition to non-agriculture relative to rural men, but at the same time, increasing gender gap among the urban population.
Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai’s Concession Era
Laura Alfaro, Cathy Ge Bao, Maggie X. Chen, Junjie Hong, Claudia Steinwender, Jul 09,
2025
Trademarks, which identify the source of goods and services, account for the majority of intellectual property filings worldwide. We investigate how firms adapt to the introduction of trademark institutions by exploring a historical precedent: China’s trademark law of 1923, an unanticipated and disapproved response to end foreign privileges in China.
Decoding China’s Industrial Policies
Hanming Fang, Ming Li, Guangli Lu, Jul 02,
2025
Industrial policy is often discussed through high-level narratives and flagship initiatives, yet its implementation—particularly at the subnational level—remains opaque. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to systematically analyze over three million government documents from 2000 to 2022, extracting structured policy information to decode China’s industrial policy at various levels of government. Combining these newly constructed granular industrial policy data with micro-level firm data, we document four sets of facts on China’s industrial policies, including the economic and political rationality of the choice of the target sectors, the dynamics of the policy tools, the diffusion and similarity of policies, and the effects on firm entry and productivity.
Excessive Issuance of New Funds in China and Implications for Investor Protection
Shuai Ye, Jinfan Zhang, Kaixuan Zheng, Jun 25,
2025
The Chinese mutual fund industry is only one-tenth the size of its US counterpart, but the number of funds in China has surpassed that of the US. Our study shows that such a large number of funds is unhealthy: managers issue new funds repetitively with different custodian banks, resulting in the average manager overseeing 2.7 funds. Managers shift profits to new funds in order to attract more flows. Among funds under the same manager, new funds have higher returns than old funds, spurring concerns over investor protection.
Do Chinese Cultures Spawn Family Businesses
Joseph P. H. Fan, Qiankun Gu, Joyce Xin Yu, Jun 18,
2025
Using a sample of Chinese private-sector firms that went public, we find that founders from the country’s regions with stronger collectivist cultures engage more family members as managers, retain more firm ownership within the family, and share the controlling ownership with more family members. Our study suggests that the collectivist culture boosts the formation of family businesses because the collectivist culture reduces information asymmetry, shirking problems, and associated monitoring costs among family members.
Visible Hands: Professional Asset Managers’ Expectations and the Stock Market in China
John Ammer, John Rogers, Gang Wang, Yang Yu, Jun 11,
2025
Mutual funds have become an important type of private institutional investor in Chinese security markets, with assets under management exceeding $3 trillion. We study how Chinese fund managers’ growth expectations affect their equity investment decisions, and in turn, the effects on stock prices. We identify a strong short-run causal effect of growth expectations on stock returns. We also find that fund investment helps bring prices in line with firms’ longer-run earnings prospects.
Building Tall, Falling Short: An Empirical Assessment of Chinese Skyscrapers
Ziyang Chen, Ting Chen, Yatang Lin, Jin Wang, Jun 04,
2025
Amid debates around state-led urbanization in developing countries, we analyze the causes and consequences of China’s skyscraper boom. We find that local governments often subsidize these projects through discounted land prices, motivated by political incentives. However, we find that such subsidies offer minimal long-term benefits, largely due to a mismatch with local conditions.