A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
Facebook 
Twitter 
Instagram
WeChat 
Email Most Popular
The Effect of Pollution and Heat on the Productivity of High-Skill Public Sector Workers in China
Matthew E. Kahn, Pei Li, May 22, 2019The quality of governance depends on public sector worker productivity. We use micro data from China to document that judges are less productive on polluted days. We find that public sector productivity elasticities are larger than the published estimates of private sector productivity elasticities with respect to pollution.
The Price of Growing Like China: Higher Income Risks and Less Consumption Insurance
Raül Santaeulàlia-Llopis, Yu Zheng, Jun 20, 2018Widening income inequality in China has prompted President Xi Jinping to shift focus and to emphasize the fostering of balanced, high-quality development. But how exactly did income inequality evolve over China’s growth process and what was its impact on consumption and welfare? Using a long panel of income and consumption data from thousands of rural and urban households, we document that the increasing income inequality in China mainly reflects increasing permanent income risk, against which it became harder and harder to insure consumption, over the period of rapid income growth from 1989 to 2009. In other words, as household income grew, so did income fluctuations. These income fluctuations had an increasingly direct impact on consumption. For rural households, the welfare cost from increasing income risk and increasing exposure of consumption to income risk can almost cancel out the welfare gain from accelerated income growth over those twenty years.
The Impact of Health Insurance on the Wellbeing of Older Chinese
Sisi Yang, Katja Hanewald, Aug 12, 2020Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2011, 2013 and 2015, we analyze whether the universal health insurance system in China increases the life satisfaction of middle-aged and older adults and to what extent the type of health insurance affects their life satisfaction. We find that the life satisfaction of middle-aged and older adults does not depend on having any health insurance...
How Did the US-China Trade War Affect American Communities?
Michael E. Waugh, Apr 22, 2020The US-China trade war—the unprecedented tit-for-tat increase in tariffs by the US and China—provided a unique laboratory to study and understand how changes in trade policy can redistribute the gains from trade. I argue that the trade war induced concentrated losses in consumption and employment for American communities most exposed to Chinese retaliatory tariffs.
Bright Side of Government Credit: Evidence from a Superbank in China
Hong Ru, May 09, 2018This study traces the heterogeneous effects of government credit across different levels of the supply chain. I find that China Development Bank's industrial loans to state-owned enterprises crowd out private firms in the same industry but crowd in private firms in downstream industries. Moreover, China Development Bank's infrastructure loans crowd in private firms. It is important for policy makers to disentangle these opposing effects of government credit.
