{"title":"Analysis of COVID-19 Prevention and Control Modes and Effects","authors":"Jian Zhou, Xiaona Lu, Liang Ye, Yun Shao","doi":"10.54605/fec20210403","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54605/fec20210403","url":null,"abstract":"This study evaluates COVID-19 prevention and control policies. Based on the simulation, we compare the effects of two major policies: contact restriction and active treatment. Through regression and cluster analysis, we classified 169 countries and regions in the world into 10 groups, among which five groups accounted for the major proportion: the ones with the labels “CHN (China) mode,” “SE (South Europe) mode,” “ENE-SSA (East & North Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa) mode,” “US (United States) mode,” and “DEU (Germany) mode”). Differences in the effects of the prevention and control of COVID-19 in typical countries in each mode are comprehensively investigated. The conclusions of this study can be summarized as follows: First, contact restriction outperforms active treatment in curbing the spread of COVID-19. Second, “CHN mode” ranks the highest level of epidemic control and emphasizes epidemic prevention and control more than economic stimulus, which is the opposite of the “US mode”. Regression analysis reveals that the differences in epidemics worldwide are caused by policy differences among modes.","PeriodicalId":44830,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers of Economics in China","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44653286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of COVID-19 on Stock Market in China","authors":"Nan Li, Yuhong Zhu","doi":"10.54605/fec20210406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54605/fec20210406","url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 on the stock ambiguity, risks, liquidity, and stock prices in China stock market, before and after the outbreak of COVID-19 during the Chinese Spring Festival holidays in 2020. We measure stock ambiguity using the intraday trading data. The outbreak of COVID-19 has a significant impact on the average stock ambiguity, risk, and illiquidity in China and induces structural break in the market average ambiguity. However, the equity premium and liquidity premium change little during the same period. The market average stock ambiguity and risks decrease, and stock liquidity improves to pre-pandemic levels as the pandemic is under control in China. The market average stock ambiguity and risks in China increase again when the confirmed new cases in the U.S. surge in the second half of 2020. We also find a “flight-to-liquidity” phenomenon, and the equally-weighted (value-weighted) 20-trading-day liquidity premium declined significantly to about –4.42% (–6.48%) during the fourth quarter of 2020.","PeriodicalId":44830,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers of Economics in China","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45263244","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"New Nosocomephobia? Changes in Hospitalizations during the COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"Feng-man Dou, Mengna Luan, Zhigang Tao, Hongjie Yuan, Fangxue Yu","doi":"10.54605/fec20210402","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54605/fec20210402","url":null,"abstract":"While the coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic directly caused millions of hospitalizations and deaths, its indirect impacts on people with other illnesses can be of equal importance. Using discharge records in a major Chinese megacity where there was a limited number of COVID-19 cases, we find significant declines in the number of hospital admissions for a whole spectrum of disease categories during the pandemic. The declines were larger in COVID-19 designated hospitals and top-grade hospitals. In-hospital mortality and length of stay (LOS) were higher for stroke, ischaemic heart diseases, and malignant neoplasms, while women delivering in hospitals had fewer C-sections and shorter LOS. Our results suggest that people avoided necessary hospitalization out of fear of being infected by COVID-19. To prevent the adverse impacts of delaying health care, policymakers should establish clear guidelines encouraging people to seek necessary care, especially during the reopening period.","PeriodicalId":44830,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers of Economics in China","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46481219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumption: Evidence from Weekly UnionPay Card Transaction Data in Shanghai","authors":"Y. Liu, Xiaokun Chang, Wei Wang, Mengting Zhao","doi":"10.54605/fec20210407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54605/fec20210407","url":null,"abstract":"The new coronavirus outbreak provides a genuinely exogenous unanticipated shock that enables this study to identify its impact on offline consumption, using unique weekly UnionPay card transaction data in 16 districts of 206 business circles in Shanghai, after China’s outbreak in late January 2020. Based on the difference-in-differences estimation strategy, this study finds that weekly offline consumption fell by 1.843 million RMB, and offline consumption frequency fell 447 times per business circle during the 20 subsequent weeks. It also finds a significant heterogeneity effect on different districts and categories, different times in a day of offline consumption spending in the post-COVID-19 pandemic window period, in which the government implemented different level policy responses for major public health emergencies. These findings suggest that offline consumption fell drastically after the unanticipated pandemic shock, which also means that policymakers need to be cautious in achieving a balance between economic recovery and epidemic prevention and control.","PeriodicalId":44830,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers of Economics in China","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47379472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lirong Liu, S. Shwiff, S. Shwiff, Maryfrances Miller
{"title":"Impact of COVID-19 on the US and Texas Economy: A General Equilibrium Approach","authors":"Lirong Liu, S. Shwiff, S. Shwiff, Maryfrances Miller","doi":"10.54605/fec20210405","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54605/fec20210405","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on the US and Texas economy using a computable general equilibrium model, REMI PI+. We consider three scenarios based on economic forecasts from various sources, including the University of Michigan’s RSQE (Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics), IMF, and the Wi orld Bank. We report a GDP loss of $106 million (a 6% decline) with 1.2 million jobs lost (6.6%) in Texas in 2020. At the national level, GDP loss is $996 billion (a 5% decline) with 11.5 million jobs lost (5.5%) in the same year. By 2026, the aggregate total GDP loss in Texas ranges from $378 to $629 million. The estimated unemployment rate in Texas in 2021 ranges from 5% to 7.7%, depending on modeling assumptions. The granularity of the CGE results allow examination of the most and least impacted industries. Health Care and Social Assistance, Construction, and Accommodation and Food Services incur the most job loss while State and Local Government and Farm will likely see an increase in jobs for 2020. These insights separate our work from most current impact studies.","PeriodicalId":44830,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers of Economics in China","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44751280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hit Hard but Recover Slowly: The Asymmetric Effects of Social Distancing Policies on the US Labor Market","authors":"Shujie Peng, Jingjing Ye","doi":"10.54605/fec20210404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54605/fec20210404","url":null,"abstract":"This study employs a difference-in-differences approach to examine the US labor market response to two widely used social distancing policies, stay-at-home (SAH) order and non-essential business closure, with special attention paid to the asymmetric effect of the policies’ imposition and lifting. Exploiting the variation across states and time, we find that state employment rates declined by 4.3% and 1.9% for the two policies respectively, within one month of the enaction of social distancing policies, but the recovery was slower after the policies were removed. We also highlight that the low-income group suffered the highest employment rate drop from the SAH enaction while presenting the mildest rebound. Self-employed workers were more affected by the policy impositions but recovered slightly faster than wage earners. Our results suggest persistent efforts must be made after the pandemic, especially for more vulnerable groups in the labor market.","PeriodicalId":44830,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers of Economics in China","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43581913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Impact of China, the EU, and the US on Africa through the Lens of Output Growth and FDI","authors":"Marvellous Ngundu, N. Ngepah","doi":"10.54605/fec20210306","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54605/fec20210306","url":null,"abstract":"This study uses a vector of FDI-weighted real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates as proxy for the output growth of China, the European Union (EU), and the United States (US). Using a two-stage least squares estimator over a sample of 42 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 2003–2012, our findings reveal that only the EU’s output spillovers have a significant impact on sub-Saharan Africa’s growth: a 1% increase (decrease) in the EU’s output growth can lead to a 0.02% increase (decrease) in sub-Saharan Africa’s real GDP per capita. The results obtained from the panel threshold regression analysis indicate that this linkage is not conditional on the availability of natural resources, unlike the output spillovers from the US and China, which bear a positive impact only in countries with resource rents of at least 24.3% and 24.1%, respectively. These are mostly oil-abundant countries, implying that China’s motive for natural resources in Africa is not different from that of the US. While the resource rents threshold level of 24.3% can serve as the benchmark for natural resource management policies to benefit from both China and the US output spillovers, a diversified FDI is also encouraged to minimize the risk associated with the resource growth paradigm.","PeriodicalId":44830,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers of Economics in China","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43232922","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Impact of the OMRR Operation in Fighting the Adverse Effects of COVID-19 on the Chinese Stock Market: An Event Study","authors":"Lingfeng Guo, Xufei Zhang, Songlei Chao","doi":"10.54605/fec20210304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54605/fec20210304","url":null,"abstract":"The outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic has had an adverse effect on China's economy. This paper uses the event study method to test and measure the impact of the open market reverse repo (OMRR) operation on the Chinese stock market. The results show that the OMRR operation generates a positive daily abnormal return and a positive daily cumulative abnormal return on average for all stocks. The impact is larger for non-state-owned enterprise (non-SOE) firms than for SOE firms, stocks of non-Hubei provinces than those of the Hubei province, and for stocks of the information transmission and technology industry than those of other industries. We suggest that our government implement more prudent monetary policies and more proactive fiscal policies.","PeriodicalId":44830,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers of Economics in China","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45538355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corruption News and Corporate Investment: Evidence from China","authors":"Carlos D. Ramirez, Y. Huang","doi":"10.54605/fec20210301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54605/fec20210301","url":null,"abstract":"We examine whether corporate corruption scrutiny affects corporate investment in China. A corruption news index (CNI) containing firm-specific measures of corruption scrutiny was developed by tracking all articles in the press about corruption for all firms trading on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges between 2000 and 2016. We found that a standard deviation increase in CNI is associated with a modest and short-lived decline in investment, ranging from 2 to 10 percent, with a stronger effect among SOEs. We explore two channels that can explain the CNI-investment effect: (i) a shift in the cost of external finance and (ii) a rise in political uncertainty connected with corporate corruption scrutiny. Our results indicate that CNI lowers the cost of external finance, pointing to a beneficial aspect of corruption cleanup. However, the effect of CNI on investment is amplified in the presence of provincial political turnover, providing support for the political uncertainty channel. The results also indicate that the negative effect of CNI on investment has significantly declined since 2013, supporting the proposition that the long-term benefits of corruption cleanup outweigh the short-term costs associated with policy uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":44830,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers of Economics in China","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48011186","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Air Pollution and Trade: The Case of China","authors":"Jin Qin, Ivan T. Kandilov, Roger H. von Haefen","doi":"10.54605/fec20210205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54605/fec20210205","url":null,"abstract":"We estimate the effects of trade on air pollution in China. To address endogeneity concerns, we use an instrumental variable strategy that treats the Great Recession as an exogenous shock that differentially affected China’s coastal provinces, which export a greater volume of manufacturing as they are closer to navigable waters. In our empirical analysis, we employ annual data on emissions of sulfur dioxide as well as smoke and dust at the province level from 2003 to 2015 to measure air pollution intensity (the ratio of air pollution to GDP), and we also use fine particulate matter (PM2.5) concentrations data derived from satellite imagery as a robustness check. We find that a decrease in trade intensity (the ratio of trade to GDP) by 10 percentage points (a negative trade shock similar to what occurred during the Great Recession) increases sulfur dioxide emissions intensity by about 38 percentage points. Emissions of the other two air pollutants grow by similar proportions.","PeriodicalId":44830,"journal":{"name":"Frontiers of Economics in China","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2021-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43978797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}