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The Value of Big Data in a Pandemic

Kairong Xiao, May 05, 2021

This article summarizes a study of the economic and public health effects of the Health Code app in China. By exploiting the staggered implementation of this technology across 322 Chinese cities, this study finds that the Health Code app significantly reduced virus transmission and facilitated economic recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. A macroeconomic susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) model calibrated to the micro-level estimates shows...

China’s New Goal for Income Distribution: What Does it Mean and are There Tradeoffs?

Martin Ravallion, Shaohua Chen, Mar 16, 2022

China’s political leadership recently committed to expanding the proportion of middle-income groups to create a less polarised, and more ‘olive-shaped’, distribution of wealth. This column considers the potential trade-offs between reducing income polarisation and other goals, including poverty reduction.

Opening Up in the 21st Century: A Quantitative Accounting of Chinese Export Growth

Loren Brandt, Kevin Lim, Apr 12, 2023

China’s rapid export growth has spurred extensive research investigating its effects on other economies. However, the exact causes of the boom as well as the slowdown in Chinese exporting after 2007 are less well understood.

The Fertility Consequences of Air Pollution in China

Xuwen Gao, Ran Song, Christopher Timmins, Sep 07, 2022

We incorporate pollution exposure into Becker’s Quantity-Quality (Q-Q) model of fertility and evaluate how air pollution distorts individuals’ fertility behaviors in China. We find that increased pollution over time negatively affects the fertility of ethnic Han people, but does not affect the fertility of ethnic minorities. China’s One-Child Policy increased Han people’s demand for child quality (e.g., health status and education achievement), which can explain the negative association between pollution and fertility for Han people.

“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”: Evidence of Directed Search from a Field Experiment

Haoran He, David Neumark, Qian Weng, Jun 16, 2021

We explore the impact of wage offers on job applications, testing implications of the directed search model and trying to distinguish it from random search. We use a field experiment conducted on an online Chinese job board, with real jobs for which we randomly varied the wage offers across three ranges. We find that higher wage offers raise application rates overall, which is consistent with directed search...