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Human-Capital Externalities in China

Edward L. Glaeser, Ming Lu, Oct 10, 2024

This paper provides evidence of heterogeneous human-capital externality using CHIP 2002, 2007, and 2013 data from urban China. After instrumenting city-level education using the number of relocated university departments across cities in the 1950s, one additional year of city-level education increases individual hourly wages by 22.0 percent, more than twice the OLS estimate. Human-capital externality is greater for all groups of urban residents in the instrumental variables estimation.

Impacts of Housing Policy: China’s Experiment

Kaiji Chen, Qing Wang, Tong Xu, Tao Zha, Jan 13, 2021

China’s unprecedented and unexpected loosening of loan-to-value ratio (LTV) policy during 2014Q4–2016Q3 provides an ideal case to study the role of housing policy in housing booms and busts and its impacts on consumption and debt burdens among households. Evidence from three unique micro datasets shows that such a policy change disproportionately increased the share of mortgages to middle-aged and high-income homeowners in the total amount of newly issued mortgages and at the same time reduced their consumption growth...

Does VAT Have Higher Tax Compliance Than a Turnover Tax? Evidence from China

Jianjun Li, Xuan Wang, Jan 15, 2020

We study the effects of compliance with the value-added tax (VAT) by exploiting the reform that replaced business tax (BT) with VAT in China beginning in 2012. We find that replacing the BT with VAT significantly increases the reported sales and costs for treated firms, and the impact is much stronger for business-to-business (B2B) transactions than for business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. Buyers in B2B transactions...

Household Finance in China

Russell Cooper, Guozhong Zhu, Sep 20, 2017

We study household financial choices in China and compare them with those in the US. We estimate a structural model where the two countries differ in terms of preferences and institutional arrangements. In the structural estimation, we take into account the effects of important structural changes in the Chinese economy between 1990-2000.

The Impact of the China Tire Safeguard

Sunghoon Chung, Joonhyung Lee, Oct 23, 2019

This column evaluates the impact of the China tire safeguard on the US tire industry. Contrary to claims made by the US government, we find that total employment and average wages in the tire industry were unaffected by the safeguard. This result is not surprising as we find that Chinese tires have been completely diverted to other exporting countries due to the strong presence of multinational corporations in the world tire market. On the other hand, US domestic tire prices increased by up to 10% during the safeguard period...