A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Do Chinese Cultures Spawn Family Businesses
Joseph P. H. Fan, Qiankun Gu, Joyce Xin Yu, Jun 18, 2025Using a sample of Chinese private-sector firms that went public, we find that founders from the country’s regions with stronger collectivist cultures engage more family members as managers, retain more firm ownership within the family, and share the controlling ownership with more family members. Our study suggests that the collectivist culture boosts the formation of family businesses because the collectivist culture reduces information asymmetry, shirking problems, and associated monitoring costs among family members.
Will robots replace workers? Lessons from China
Osea Giuntella, Yi Lu, Tianyi Wang, Aug 06, 2025Robot adoption has skyrocketed in China in the last decade. New research finds that this exposure has led to a decline in employment and wages, influencing workers’ training and retirement decisions. How can developing countries prepare themselves for the artificial intelligence revolution?
Sowing Seeds of Mobility: The Uneven Impact of Land Reform
Ting Chen, Jiajia Gu, Rachel Ngai, Jin Wang, Jul 16, 2025Land market frictions due to incomplete property rights are a major form of mobility barrier in many developing countries, where rural households risk losing land if they stop cultivating it. This implicit barrier is made explicit through China’s Hukou system. Using two land reforms that reduce these barriers, we construct a novel county-level reform index and argue that these reforms have contributed to improvement in agricultural productivity and have uneven impact across gender. They improve rural women’s transition to non-agriculture relative to rural men, but at the same time, increasing gender gap among the urban population.
Industrial Policy and Retaliatory Protection under the WTO:Lessons from China
Yusheng Feng, Haishi Li, Siwei Wang, Min Zhu, Aug 13, 2025Industrial policy is increasingly implemented worldwide, with many policymakers and researchers highlighting its benefits (Juhász et al. 2024). However, the cost of industrial policy remains less understood. Using Chinese firm-level data, we show that higher industrial subsidies raise the likelihood and severity of foreign anti-dumping and countervailing duties at each investigation stage (Feng et al. 2025). These retaliatory tariffs wipe out roughly a quarter of the firm revenue growth the subsidies would otherwise create. Neglecting this channel may lead governments to overstate the net benefits of industrial policy and fuels deeper trade frictions and geoeconomic fragmentation.
Input Trade Liberalization and Firm Labor Market Power in China
Illenin O. Kondo, Yao Amber Li, Wei Qian, Jul 30, 2025More trade, more jobs? Or fewer? China’s accession to the WTO has catalyzed a rich research agenda on the labor market consequences of trade liberalization. Departing from the assumptions of perfectly competitive labor markets, we ask whether Chinese firms exercised more or less labor market power when input tariffs fell with China’s WTO accession? We show that input trade liberalization reduced labor monopsony power in China, especially for skill-intensive firms and in markets with more labor supply growth.
