Journal of Finance and Economics is supervised by Ministry of Education of PRC, and sponsored by Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. It aims to include research results on the major theories and practical problems in China’s reform and opening up and modernization of economic construction. Its scope covers all the major fields of Economics, including Public Economy, Finance, Accounting, Economic history, Regional Economics, Industrial Economics, International Economics. The Journal is included in CSSCI.
Under the wave of urbanization, the living mode of the elderly in rural areas in China has gradually changed from parent-child living together to independent living. At the same time, the living pattern of children living in the same county and city has gradually emerged, namely, separating without leaving the county or leaving the land but not leaving the county. At present, the research on the relationship between the living mode and the health of the elderly seldom takes children’s living situation into account, and there is no strict causal inference analysis on the cognitive health of the rural elderly. Based on the above, this paper studied the impact of children’s living distance on the cognitive health of the elderly. Meanwhile, this paper paid more attention to the impact of family care accessibility and the right to privacy of independent living. Using 2011−2015 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data, after controlling endogeneity bias by combining the panel fixed model and instrumental variables, we obtained the following empirical results. First, when couples live together, the mode of the elderly living alone is generally more conducive to the improvement of their cognitive health than that of parents and children living together, but in the case of widows or widowers, it is difficult to get cognitive health benefits from the mode of living alone. Second, when couples live together, the best distance is that children live in the neighborhood in the same county. But with the increase of the age of the elderly, the cognitive health benefits of children living in the neighborhood decrease. As far as the mechanism is concerned, it can be attributed to the fact that the elderly care in the family is provided by the spouse, which reduces the health risk caused by the remote living of children and the decrease of accessibility of family care (such as face-to-face communication), and the health benefits of the right to privacy and freedom of independent living are higher. However, for the elderly, living far away from their children is obviously not conducive to the improvement of cognitive health level when they live alone, or even worse than living with their children, which highlights the importance of care from children. In particular, through the heterogeneity analysis, we found that the old men living alone with children living in the neighborhood is not as good as living together with children; children living far away will make the cognitive health (memory score) of the elderly couples living together with low educational level worsen. Therefore, to maintain and improve the cognitive health of the elderly, there is an optimal distance for children to live, that is, there is a certain substitution relationship between the accessibility of family care and the health benefits of the right to privacy of independent living, and the marginal balance point of this substitution relationship is heterogeneous in different types of the elderly. The findings of this study provided a basis for decision-making to balance the conflict between children’s personal development opportunities and traditional family security responsibilities, and to realize the new urbanization path and the coordinated development of healthy aging. Specifically, there are three suggestions. First, the new urbanization strategy and the rural revitalization strategy should be organically combined to create conditions for the rural youth to have opportunities to develop nearby. Second, through policy design, young people in rural areas who are willing to live close to their parents should be encouraged. Third, the construction of the social care system in rural areas should be accelerated.
Under the influence of trade disputes between China and the US and the spread of Covid-19 epidemic, the turmoil in the global economy will inevitably shake the stability of the international competitiveness of Chinese manufacturing industry. Especially when firms have spanned national boundaries and become the core subject of a country’s industrial international competitiveness, the stability of the competitiveness of indigenous firms will directly determine the resilience of the Chinese manufacturing industry shocked by the epidemic. Based on the above, this paper focused on two dimensions, namely, the comparative advantages of the industrial country and the core assets of the indigenous firm, and defined the international competitiveness vulnerability of Chinese manufacturing industry as that the international competitiveness of foreign invested firms is statistically significantly higher than that of indigenous firms. Clarifying the transmission mechanism of industrial international competitiveness based on firms, this paper innovatively constructed the double-dimension and three-level evaluation system on international competitiveness vulnerability, with 84,482 Chinese manufacturing firms from 2000 to 2013 as the sample, to locate the fragile links and analyze the causes. The findings indicate that the international competitiveness vulnerability of Chinese manufacturing industry mainly exists in the competitiveness essence and performance level of high-tech industry, while the vulnerability in the competitiveness performance level of medium- and low-tech industry is gradually alleviated, and the essence and result level are in a stable state. In the high-tech industry, the improvement of Chinese industry upstreamness and the enhancement of foreign multinational corporations’ control on R&D are the reasons for the vulnerability of the competitiveness essence and performance. The increase in industry upstreamness will also make indigenous firms face potential risks in competitiveness result. In medium- and low-tech industry, advantages of foreign multinational corporations in marketing and global resource integration are the reasons for the vulnerability of competitiveness performance. The industry upstreamness consolidates the advantage of indigenous firms’ competitiveness essence, but weakens the advantage of competitiveness result. The academic value of this paper is mainly reflected in three aspects. Firstly, it enriches the theoretical connotation of industrial international competitiveness research, tests the practice of international trade theory evolution in China, and deeply analyzes the composition of industrial international competitiveness from the internal structure. Secondly, it assesses the international competitiveness based on the perspective of value-added and a large number of firm data. Thirdly, it locates the links and digs the causes of competitiveness vulnerabilities, helping to discover the shortcomings of Chinese manufacturing industry and accordingly formulate strategies to enhance international competitiveness.
In recent years, more and more non-financial enterprises have invested a large amount of capital in financial assets and resulted in an obvious trend of transforming from real economy to virtual economy in China, which has attracted continuous attention from the government and academia. Existing studies usually assume that enterprises’ financialization decisions are independent of other enterprises, while little literature considers the interaction between different enterprises’ financialization decisions, that is, the contagion effect of enterprises’ financialization behaviors. Using the data of Chinese listed firms from 2001 to 2016, this paper investigated the existence, mechanism and economic consequences of the contagion effect of financialization behaviors based on the perspective of peer effects. This paper concluded that it is a significant contagion effect in the financialization decision of enterprises, and the degree of financialization is significantly positively correlated with the average degree of financialization of other enterprises in the same industry or province. To overcome endogeneity, we employed an instrumental variable approach based on peer firms’ average stock idiosyncratic returns and idiosyncratic volatility. Our results are still robust even after controlling endogeneity. Besides, our results are also robust by conducting a series of other robust tests. Furthermore, we explored the motivation of financialization peer effects from three aspects, namely, information learning, maintaining competitive balance and reducing agency cost. The results showed that the motivation of information learning and agency cost is the potential reasons driving the financialization peer effect of enterprises. Specifically, follower enterprises with information disadvantages are inclined to imitate the financialization behavior of leader enterprises with information advantages in the same industry and province, otherwise, it is not true. The peer effect of financialization is more pronounced among enterprises that face environment with a higher degree of information asymmetry and a higher degree of uncertainty. And the peer effect of financialization of enterprises with higher agency cost (state-owned enterprises or enterprises with more serious director corruption) will be stronger. In addition, we examined the economic consequences of enterprise financialization peer effects, and found that the financialization based on peer effects reduces the idiosyncratic risk of enterprises while increases the systemic risk and the total risk. The main contributions of this paper are as follows. (1) It provides a new microscopic perspective for understanding the occurrence and strengthening the mechanism of transformation from real economy to virtual economy in China. (2) It expands the literature on enterprise financialization. (3) It enriches the research on the peer effect of financial decision-making.
The escalating of Sino-US trade friction has become a hot topic widely concerned by the government and academia. The United States has frequently created trade disputes with China on the grounds that the Sino-US trade surplus is too large and import competition from China has robbed the employment opportunities of US. The Sino-US economic and trade relationship is the stabilizer of the relationship between the two major countries. It is of great significance to stabilize Sino-US economic development. China’s expansion of imports from the United States is one of the feasible ways to alleviate Sino-US trade frictions. However, the question is whether the import competition from the United States will have a negative impact on China’s manufacturing employment. To answer this question, this paper examined the impact of import competition from the United States on employment in China’s manufacturing industry and its mechanisms from the perspective of enterprises and industries. The results are as follows. On the whole, import competition from the United States has significantly promoted the employment growth of Chinese manufacturing enterprises. Import competition from the US mainly affects the employment growth of enterprises through promoting enterprise innovation and increasing enterprise markup. From the perspective of upstream and downstream related industries, import competition of the upstream industry has a significant promotion effect on the employment growth of enterprises, and import competition of the downstream industry has a significant inhibitory effect on the employment growth of enterprises. From the industry level, import competition from the United States has no significant impact on the overall employment of China’s industry. The academic value of this paper is mainly reflected in three aspects. First, existing research mainly examined the impact of import competition from China on the employment of importing countries from the perspective of Western developed countries. However, there are few studies focused on the impact of import competition from other countries on employment in China. Therefore, this paper is an important supplement to the existing literature. Second, this paper not only constructs the import competition indexes of consumer goods, intermediate goods and capital goods from the perspective of heterogeneous import products, but also further constructs the import competition indexes of upstream and downstream industries, and comprehensively examines the impact of import competition from the United States on China’s manufacturing employment. Third, the conclusions of this paper can provide policy guidelines for mitigating Sino-US trade friction.
Although the 1994 tax-sharing reform has well regulated the income division between the central government and local governments, the premise of political centralization determines that China’s decentralization institutional reform will increase the central government’s financial concentration and macro-control capabilities as one of the reform goals. Under China’s fiscal decentralization system, the asymmetry between income decentralization and expenditure decentralization undoubtedly aggravated the mismatch of local governments’ financial resources and authority, which requires that the central government’s transfer payment plays a pivotal role in balancing intergovernmental fiscal relations. First, we constructed the local government expenditure equation including the central government’s transfer payment in the Barro-Gordon model framework, and then solved the optimal solution of the Cobb-Douglas production function considering the central government’s transfer payment and local government expenditure, thereby theoretically proving that the central government’s transfer payment has a non-linear effect on the structure of local government expenditure. Second, a panel quantile regression model was established to analyze the impact of the central government’s equalization transfer on the structure of local government expenditure, and the non-linear impact of the central government’s equalization transfer was verified. When the proportion of local governments’ productive expenditure is the relatively low, namely, 10% and 25% quintiles, the growth of the central government’s equalization transfer payment will cause local governments to increase productive expenditure. However, when local governments’ productive expenditure accounts for more than 50%, the impact of the central government’s equalization transfer payment on the structure of local government expenditure changes from positive to negative. Third, this paper took the central government’s equalization transfer payment as the threshold variable, and further established a panel threshold quantile regression model to examine the impact of the central government’s equalization transfer payment proportion on the structure of local government expenditure. A new type of intergovernmental fiscal relationship which is compatible with incentives was constructed, which is not only conducive to accelerating the establishment of a modern fiscal system, but also related to the modernization of the national governance system and the improvement of governance capabilities. The above research conclusions of this paper not only have very important theoretical and practical significance for the construction of a new type of central-regional fiscal relationship with clear powers and responsibilities, financial coordination and regional balance in the new era, but also help to accelerate the establishment of a modern financial system.
