Using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2011, 2013 and 2015, we analyze whether the universal health insurance system in China increases the life satisfaction of middle-aged and older adults and to what extent the type of health insurance affects their life satisfaction. We find that the life satisfaction of middle-aged and older adults does not depend on having any health insurance...
We use a new case-level dataset to document a set of stylized facts on bankruptcy in China and study how the introduction of specialized courts across Chinese cities affected insolvency resolution and the local economy. We find that specialized courts hire better-trained judges and are 35% faster at dealing with bankruptcy cases than civil courts within the same city. We also find evidence that their introduction benefited the local economy by fostering firm entry, increasing average capital productivity, and favoring the reallocation of employment out of "zombie" firm–intensive sectors.
The “China shock” operated in part through the U.S. housing market, which is one important reason the China shock was as big as it was. If housing prices had not responded at all to the China shock, then the total employment effect would have been reduced by more than one-half. Even when fully recognizing that housing prices responded to the China shock, the independent employment effect of the China shock is still reduced by around 30%.
This paper analyzes the effect of China's 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization on structural transformation at the local level, exploiting cross-sectional variation in tariff uncertainty faced by county economies pre-2001. Using a new panel of 1,800 Chinese counties from 1996 to 2013, we find that counties more exposed to the reduction in tariff uncertainty post-accession are characterized by increasing exports...
We provide a rigorous examination of the causal impact of human mobility restrictions, particularly the lockdown of the city of Wuhan on January 23, 2020, on the containment and delay of the spread of the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in China. We employ various difference-in-differences strategies to disentangle the lockdown effect on human mobility reductions from other confounding effects, including a panic effect, a virus deterrence effect, and a Spring Festival effect...