Research Work

Evidences have been found in literature that the use of new technology could help people in developing countries form and enhance their risk-sharing networks and become more resilient to shocks. Despite the quick adaption of mobile payment in China during recent years and the existence of a large group of migrant workers, a systematical analysis on whether the mobile payment innovation in China imposes an impact on the risk-sharing within the informal network among rural households is currently absent. This research aims to utilize the Covid-19 pandemic as an exogenous shock to investigate the rural household risk-sharing behaviors and the impact of the transaction cost reduction due to mobile payment in rural China. Our work could provide further insights into how mobile payment helps households and develop the economy in a more confounding way.

An autocrat equipped with the absolute power dominates over the subordinates, meanwhile a class of aristocrats usually existed in any autocratic regime. This paper considers a principal-agent model with no third-party enforcement. An innovative setting that allows the principal to design the agents’ expected vacancy value explains how granting privilege to the agents could optimize the principal’s expected profit.

We study the effect of China’s anti-contagious policy on labor market outcomes in 2020. By exploiting variation in the duration of the zero-Covid policy in China, which is triggered by the outbreak of new cases of COVID-19 in a 14-day observation window, we find that a 10% increase (3.7 days in average) in the duration of the zero-Covid policy caused the probability of unemployment to increase by around 0.1. Unlike most large economies that suffered a serious health shock from the COVID-19 pandemic, China effectively contained the scale and the spread of the initial outbreak in 2020. This provides a special empirical setting to examine the policy effect of anti-contagious policies, and we show that the disruption on the labor market majorly comes from the zero-Covid containment measures, while health shocks are trivial on the labor market outcomes. Moreover, the zero-Covid policy decreases the labor income and hours worked for employed individuals, and the policy effect is heterogeneous across demographic groups. We also examined the policy effect during different phases of the pandemic, and the results imply that the stringent clearance during the first stage of the pandemic (ended by Feb 17, 2020) caused the negative impacts on the labor outcomes, while the subsequent dynamic clearance strategy did not generate significant disruption on the labor market outcomes in 2020.

本文研究了中国以往一段时期的资本项目自由化政策, 并通过与世界其他国家进行对比，对该政策的实施是否带来经济增长进行了实证分析。研究发现: 一方面, 金融管制逐渐放宽的趋势在一定时期内对一国或地区经济增长有正向的积极影响; 另一方面, 金融开放会降低一国或地区资本成本而提升投资增长率, 并且资本项目逐步自由化的过程有助于股票市场的发展。