中国经济评论最新文献

{"title":"Expanding the wealth concept: How pension wealth shapes wealth inequality in China","authors":"Jiashan Li,&nbsp;Shi Li,&nbsp;XingJian Yi","doi":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102771","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102771","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Pension benefits share similar attributes and functions with wealth in the traditional sense, yet the distributional characteristics of the expected present value of pension wealth and its impact on household wealth distribution have not been systematically analyzed or discussed. This study examines the impact of pension wealth on household wealth distribution using data from the China Household Finance Survey. The findings reveal that incorporating pension wealth into the wealth accounting framework reduces inequality, as pension wealth is more equally distributed and accounts for a larger share of assets among low- and middle-wealth groups. The inclusion of pension wealth increases the wealth share of the bottom 90% by 7.1 percentage points and lowers the Gini coefficient from 0.761 to 0.706. Urban employee pensions contribute most to this reduction, while rural-urban resident pensions have a modest effect. Fiscal subsidies play a significant role, accounting for 29.09% of the change in the Gini coefficient. Simulations suggest that expanding pension coverage among low-wealth groups or raising contribution levels and interest rates for rural-urban pensions could further mitigate inequality. This study broadens the conceptual framework of wealth measurement and enhances understanding of household wealth distribution in China.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48285,"journal":{"name":"中国经济评论","volume":"101 ","pages":"Article 102771"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149156588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Does the mobile application sales channel strengthen insurance inclusion? Evidence from critical illness insurance","authors":"Wei Xu,&nbsp;Xian Xu","doi":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102775","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102775","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Mobile insurance is gaining increasing popularity in the global insurance industry. Using a unique data of a best-selling mobile cancer insurance product from a Chinese life insurer, this paper studies the relationship between mobile technology and insurance inclusion. We find that the introduction of the mobile application channel disproportionately increases the take-up of low-insured-amount policies relative to high-insured-amount policies. This inclusive effect toward small policies is driven mainly by newly attracted enrollees with lower-income characteristics. Mechanism analyses show that the mobile application channel reduces transaction costs and weakens offline intermediation frictions that otherwise disadvantage low-insured-amount customers. However, mobile insurance inclusion is regionally unequal due to the digital divide—it is stronger in more developed areas. We also find that the inclusive effect extends beyond policy take-up to after-purchase outcomes including claim and indemnity, thereby improving the welfare of low-insured-amount policyholders.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48285,"journal":{"name":"中国经济评论","volume":"101 ","pages":"Article 102775"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149156884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Land collateralization without capitalization: The missing De Soto effect in China's agricultural land mortgage reform","authors":"Lishan Wang,&nbsp;Xiaolin Dong,&nbsp;Hao Qi","doi":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102776","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102776","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper exploits China's agricultural land mortgage reform as a quasi-natural experiment to examine whether strengthening land property rights improves rural credit market performance. Using panel data from 1700 rural commercial banks across China over 2010–2018, and employing a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the reform did not lead to a statistically significant expansion in the supply of agriculture-related credit, providing no evidence of a De Soto effect under the prevailing institutional conditions. We attribute this null finding to the limited mortgageability of agricultural land management rights: neither household-contracted nor transferred management rights satisfies the core criteria of eligible collateral. These findings suggest that the realization of a De Soto effect depends critically on the surrounding institutional and market environment and requires carefully designed complementary policies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48285,"journal":{"name":"中国经济评论","volume":"101 ","pages":"Article 102776"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149156810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Navigating climate shocks: The macroeconomic and financial stabilizing role of government-led resilience investments","authors":"Wenli Xu,&nbsp;Weice Yin","doi":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102781","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102781","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Extreme climate events destroy capital, amplify financial frictions, and occur with probabilities that depend endogenously on emissions. We study these interactions in a New Keynesian environmental DSGE model with green and brown firms, disaster risk, bank balance-sheet frictions, and resilience capital. Resilience investment mitigates output losses and stabilizes banks by substituting for damaged private capital. When recovery is concentrated in brown production, resilience investment can generate an emissions rebound. A carbon tax contains this rebound and raises welfare, whereas green quantitative easing mainly reallocates credit and provides limited aggregate stabilization. Effective resilience policy therefore requires coordination across adaptation, mitigation, and financial stability.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48285,"journal":{"name":"中国经济评论","volume":"101 ","pages":"Article 102781"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149212484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The employment effects of ICT investment: evidence from China","authors":"Lilong He,&nbsp;Kun Li,&nbsp;Jiapei Guo,&nbsp;Yanchi Zou","doi":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102780","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102780","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper investigates the employment effects of information and communication technology (ICT) investment across 336 Chinese regions from 2010 to 2020, employing a Bartik instrument. Results reveal that ICT investment significantly promotes overall employment growth. Although hardware-specific ICT investment exerts a substitution effect on manufacturing employment, the subsequent efficiency gains in the manufacturing sector stimulate demand expansion in downstream service industries, driving net job creation. Furthermore, the employment gains are primarily concentrated among middle-skilled workers and in regions with a higher exposure to non-routine tasks. Spatially, ICT investment generates positive spillovers for geographically proximate areas, while exerting negative spillovers on regions with similar economic scales. These findings underscore the positive contribution of ICT investment to China’s employment growth over the past decade, highlighting a distinct pattern from that observed in developed economies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48285,"journal":{"name":"中国经济评论","volume":"101 ","pages":"Article 102780"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149156883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trade conflicts spillovers: Not only for goods, but also for bonds","authors":"Linxiong Deng,&nbsp;Zheng Jiang,&nbsp;Huimin Shi","doi":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102778","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102778","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper constructs a measure of firm level tariff exposure and examines how import and export tariff shocks affect the corporate bond financing activities of Chinese listed firms. The results show that import tariffs imposed by the China side systematically raise the financing costs and reduce the issuance amounts of the affected firms, while unexpectedly the export tariffs imposed by the US side have very limited effects. Further evidence based on the responses of credit ratings and secondary market trading confirm that firms exposed to import tariff shocks suffer from a contraction of funds supply. Moreover, firms with higher external finance dependence, lower asset tangibility, more operation volatilities, or less government affiliations are more adversely affected. Meanwhile, the green bonds exhibit greater resilience during trade conflicts. Overall, this study highlights the central role of import tariffs in shaping the financing capacities of the Chinese firms in the bond markets. Our paper shows that how trade conflicts are transmitted to financial market, which might be a source of fluctuations for the financial market and the aggregate economy.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48285,"journal":{"name":"中国经济评论","volume":"101 ","pages":"Article 102778"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149212485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Beyond the patient's story: Relational testimonies and medical crowdfunding outcomes in China","authors":"Anqi Wu,&nbsp;Xiaoting Zheng,&nbsp;Ying Wang,&nbsp;Liting Su","doi":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102779","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102779","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Medical crowdfunding has emerged as a critical financing channel for medical expenses, especially among populations with inadequate health insurance coverage. However, a substantial number of campaigns fail to meet their fundraising targets, partly attributable to credibility concerns stemming from information asymmetry. Drawing on a unique dataset from a major online medical crowdfunding platform in China, this study examines how specific narrative strategies embedded in relational testimonies influence fundraising outcomes. We find that three credibility enhancing narrative strategies, including identity construction, situation supplement, and encouragement or blessing, are positively associated with the total funds raised. Credibility-enhancing strategies are especially effective in attracting large donations (&gt;30 yuan) from donors with closer social ties to the patient, whereas direct appeals are critical for soliciting small donations (≤30 yuan) from more socially distant donors. Notably, situation supplement strategy exerts a particularly strong effect among rural patients. To address endogeneity and establish causality, we employ a difference-in-differences design that tracks donation patterns around the posting of the first testimony. We define a testimony as “persuasive” if it combines a direct appeal with at least one credibility-enhancing strategy and find that persuasive testimonies lead to a significant and persistent increase of approximately 14% in small donations within the hour following their posting, relative to non-persuasive testimonies. The persuasive effect tends to strengthen with the social distance between the testifier and the patient, operates consistently across different posting times, and is not driven by the patient's inherent social capital. Our findings highlight relational testimonies as a socially constructed mechanism for mitigating credibility deficits, offering implications for understanding how vulnerable populations mobilize financial support to cope with catastrophic health expenditures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48285,"journal":{"name":"中国经济评论","volume":"101 ","pages":"Article 102779"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149156881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Poetry and distant places: How Tang and Song literature shapes China's modern tourism economy","authors":"Yanyan Gao","doi":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102777","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102777","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper provides causal evidence on how intangible cultural capital creates modern economic value through tourism. We focus on China's Tang and Song (T&amp;S) literature (618–1279 CE), which is widely regarded as the pinnacle of Chinese classical culture and a key part of the national literary canon, and use newly compiled data on the spatial distribution of T&amp;S literary works linked to city-level tourism outcomes from 2002 to 2019. By instrumenting local literary richness with the historical presence of famous academies and the number of pre-Tang poets, we estimate an elasticity of about 0.2 between T&amp;S literary works and domestic tourism outcomes, indicating a substantial positive contribution of T&amp;S literature to China's modern tourism economy. We further document that this effect is mainly driven by a demand-side force: T&amp;S works included in the Chinese language textbooks create widely shared cultural references that increase destination salience and boost tourism demand for their cities of origin. Moreover, two complementary supply-side channels support this effect: cities with higher T&amp;S literary output later accumulated more cultural resources and developed a richer array of tourism products. These results highlight that intangible literary canons, once standardized and disseminated through formal education, serve as a scalable demand-side asset that generates lasting, place-specific tourism benefits even more than a thousand years after their creation.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48285,"journal":{"name":"中国经济评论","volume":"101 ","pages":"Article 102777"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2026-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149156882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"U.S.–China trade conflicts and third-country effects","authors":"Qingzheng Cao,&nbsp;Dongzhou Mei","doi":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102757","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102757","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Since the onset of the U.S.–China trade conflict in 2018, the United States has repeatedly imposed import tariffs on Chinese goods, and China has responded with retaliatory measures. Within a deeply interconnected global economy, we examine the role of the third country in shaping the macroeconomic effects of U.S.–China trade conflicts. In particular, when also subject to U.S. import tariffs, how does the third country’s behavior influence the effectiveness of China’s retaliatory measures? Using a three-country DSGE model that includes China, the United States, and the rest of the world (RoW), we find that U.S. tariffs reduce China’s exports to the United States; however, China partially offsets this decline by increasing exports to third-country markets, thereby mitigating the overall adverse effects. Under the U.S. “reciprocal tariff” policy, both China and the third country incur economic losses, and the effectiveness of China’s retaliation depends critically on the third country’s response. If the third country also retaliates, bilateral trade between China and the third country increases significantly, leading to substantial improvements in both economies, while the United States becomes the largest loser due to a deterioration in its global trade position.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48285,"journal":{"name":"中国经济评论","volume":"100 ","pages":"Article 102757"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148639057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How the U.S. Entity List affects firm breakthrough innovation: A perspective on knowledge depth and breadth","authors":"Dandan Li,&nbsp;Yiling Zhang,&nbsp;Yuhua Li","doi":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102759","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.chieco.2026.102759","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Based on knowledge combination theory, we explore the effect of the U.S. Entity List on firm breakthrough innovation, using a research sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2013 to 2022. Our findings reveal that the U.S. Entity List significantly inhibits these firms' breakthrough innovation. The U.S. Entity List lowers knowledge breadth while enhancing knowledge depth. However, as the impact of knowledge breadth on breakthrough innovation outweighs that of knowledge depth, the U.S. Entity List ultimately inhibits firm breakthrough innovation. Government innovation subsidies and supply chain integration capabilities of firms mitigate the negative effect of the U.S. Entity List on breakthrough innovation. Additionally, we find that the negative effect of the U.S. Entity List on breakthrough innovation is stronger in technology-intensive, regulated, and competitive industries.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48285,"journal":{"name":"中国经济评论","volume":"100 ","pages":"Article 102759"},"PeriodicalIF":5.9,"publicationDate":"2026-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148638988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}