A Bridge on Economic Issues between China and the World
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Free Education's Impact on Schooling Outcomes: Direct Effects and Intra-household Spillovers
Naijia Guo, Shuangxin Wang, Junsen Zhang, Mar 05, 2025This study estimates the direct and spillover effects of a free education program on educational outcomes in rural China. We find that although the program encourages more eligible children to attend secondary school, it also leads to a decrease in high school enrollment among ineligible girls with eligible siblings, as they are more likely to choose work instead. In the long run, males exposed to free education have more years of schooling than their non-exposed counterparts. However, such effect is not found among females. This disparity suggests that a gender-neutral policy may have an asymmetric effect between males and females because of spillover effects through intra-household resource allocation.
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.
Learning by Investing: entrepreneurial spillovers from venture capital
Josh Lerner, Jinlin Li, Tong Liu, May 22, 2024The experience gained by individual investors from participating in venture capital funds significantly enhances their entrepreneurial capabilities in the high-tech sector.
Migration and Resource Misallocation in China
Xiaolu Li, Lin Ma, Yang Tang, Oct 23, 2024This article discusses how reducing frictions across Chinese provinces could significantly improve aggregate output, lower spatial inequality, and discourage population concentration in large cities.
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.
