Most Popular

Lucky Dragons

Chih Ming Tan, Xiao Wang, Xiaobo Zhang, Feb 21, 2024

This article explores the intriguing connection between Chinese zodiac signs and parental investment in children’s development. Particularly, parents invest more in children born under the “lucky” sign of the dragon, potentially impacting their cognitive and noncognitive skills alike.

Trade Policy Uncertainty and Firm Innovation

Qing Liu, Hong Ma, May 12, 2021

This study proposes a novel channel through which trade liberalization may induce innovation through the reduction of trade policy uncertainties (TPU) in destination markets. To verify this link, we utilize the significant reduction of TPU engendered by China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment. We find that reduction in TPU significantly encourages firms' patent applications and that firms' innovation responses to TPU reduction vary by productivity, ownership, exporting status, and the irreversibility of investment.

The Quiet Revolution in Women’s Human Capital and the Gender Earnings Gap in the People’s Republic of China

Zhengyang Li, Guochang Zhao, Jul 08, 2020

Since the 1980s, girls’ educational attaintment increased more quickly than boys’. As a result, the gender education gap decreased and even reversed in China. How does the gender earnings gap change in the face of increasing female human capital? What are the implications for the Chinese gender earnings gap in the future? This column will shed light on this interesting topic within and across cohorts.

The Impact of FDI on Domestic Firm Innovation: Evidence from Foreign Investment Deregulation in China

Yan Liu, Xuan Wang, Aug 04, 2021

This paper studies the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic firms’ innovation in China. Using firm level patent application records that cover all manufacturing firms with annual sales above 5M Yuan from 1998 to 2007, our results show that both the quantity and quality of domestic firms’ innovation benefit from FDI. In addition to the traditional spillover effect from FDI in the same industry, the paper emphasizes the importance of knowledge spillover...

Implicit Guarantees and the Rise of Shadow Banking: the Case of Trust Products

Franklin Allen, Xian Gu, C. Wei Li, Jun Qian, Yiming Qian, Sep 06, 2023

The prevalent implicit guarantees provided by financial intermediaries have been a central feature of shadow banking products in China. Our theoretical investigation shows that providing implicit guarantees can be the second-best arrangement and mitigate capital misallocation.