This article discusses that China's mandatory Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure policies have led firms to increase their donations for poverty alleviation, yet paradoxically have also resulted in higher pollution levels, thereby highlighting the potential environmental negative externalities that can arise from the government's mild steering of corporate behavior through disclosure mandates.
We conducted a randomized field experiment of informational nudges in northern China to investigate the potential obstacles that may hinder households from adopting cleaner heating, and evaluate the effectiveness of simple SMS nudges in encouraging the transition to electric heating.
We explore how investor memory drives belief formation and trading behavior, fueling financial market volatility. Drawing on surveys of over 17,000 Chinese retail investors linked to trading records, our study finds that recollections of past returns—shaped by both salient market events in the past and current market conditions—strongly influence expectations of future returns and investors’ portfolio choices, often outweighing objective historical data. These findings suggest that memory-driven biases amplify boom-and-bust cycles, with policy implications for improving market stability by counteracting distorted recall.
China’s exports have increased dramatically in recent decades. We build a multi-sector spatial general equilibrium model and combine rich data sources to account for China’s export surge between 1990 and 2005 from three policy changes: China’s import tariffs, tariffs imposed on China’s exports, and barriers to internal migration in China. We find that the three policy changes jointly accounted for 30% of China’s export growth between 1990 and 2005 and that there is a positive interaction between tariff and migration policies.
China’s strategy for internationalizing the renminbi involves controlling the access of foreign investors to the domestic bond market.