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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.
Investor Memory and Biased Beliefs: Evidence from the Field
Zhengyang Jiang, Hongqi Liu, Cameron Peng, Hongjun Yan, Aug 20, 2025We 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.
Migration,Tariffs,and China’s Export Surge
Chen Liu, Xiao Ma, Oct 22, 2025China’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.
Firm-to-Firm Referrals
Jing Cai, Wei Lin, Adam Szeidl, Dec 25, 2024Referring suppliers to clients reshaped the supplier-client network and improved business performance.
How Credible Is Hong Kong’s Currency Peg
Urban Jermann, Bin Wei, Vivian Yue, Apr 08, 2026Using daily spot exchange rates and derivatives prices, we estimate a peg-survival probability p and an implied fundamental value of V for HKD under an alternative regime...
