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Input-Trade Liberalization, Female Skill Intensity, and Fertility in China
Feng Chen, Renliang Liu, Miaojie Yu, Apr 09, 2025The interplay between trade liberalization and demographic behavior illuminates the challenges of reconciling career and family. This paper examines how gender-specific trade liberalization influences fertility, leveraging a Bartik-style shift-share instrumental variable strategy that incorporates female skill intensity into input tariff exposure. We find that input-trade liberalization significantly reduces fertility, particularly among highly educated women, private sector employees, and first-time mothers—groups experiencing the steepest career-family trade-offs. Mechanism analysis shows that enhanced labor market prospects raise the opportunity cost of childbearing, delaying or reducing family formation. These findings underscore the socioeconomic implications of trade policy for demographic trends.
Early Childhood Exposure to Health Insurance and Adolescent Outcomes: Evidence from Rural China
Wei Huang, Hong Liu, Jul 19, 2023We examine the impact of early-life exposure to public health insurance, the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS), on outcomes in adolescence in rural China.
High-Speed Rail and China's Electric Vehicle Adoption Miracle
Hanming Fang, Ming Li, Long Wang, Yang Yang, Mar 19, 2025We investigate whether high-speed rail (HSR) connectivity influences electric vehicle (EV) adoption, using a quasi-natural experiment from China’s HSR expansion and several identification strategies. Our findings consistently show that, by alleviating range anxiety, the expansion of HSR can account for up to one third of the increase in EV market share and EV sales in China during our sample period from 2010 to 2023, with effects particularly pronounced in cities served by faster HSR lines. These results suggest that transportation infrastructure can play a complementary role in accelerating the transition to electric mobility.
Returnees and Innovation: Evidence from Chinese Publicly Listed Firms
Yibo Qiao, Andrea Ascani, Stefano Breschi, Andrea Morrison, May 28, 2025We investigate the relationship between high-skill returnees and innovation of Chinese publicly listed firms. To this aim, we construct a unique dataset of 2,499 firms over the period 2002–2016 by combining three different data sources (i.e. CNRDS, CSMAR, and LinkedIn). Our results show that different typologies of returnees (employees, technologists, and managers) with different experiences abroad (work versus study) may bring back different skills and impact differently on firm innovation.
Industrial Policy: Lessons from Shipbuilding
Panle Jia Barwick, Myrto Kalouptsidi, Nahim Bin Zahur, Dec 18, 2024The article discusses that although China's industrial policy (IP) in the shipbuilding industry significantly increased domestic shipbuilding production and global market share, it had limited effects on improving domestic welfare and led to inefficient allocation of resources.
