This paper explains the tobacco tax structure and cigarette pricing mechanism in China, develops a general analytical framework for analyzing the Chinese tobacco turnover tax system, and examines the effects of 2009 tobacco tax adjustment on cigarette prices and tax revenue. We find that...

Increasing attention has been focused on the analysis of the realized volatility, which can be treated as a proxy for the true volatility. In this paper, we study the potential use of the realized volatility as a proxy in a stochastic volatility model estimation. We estimate the leveraged...

In recent years, China has faced tremendous pressure to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. At the COP 15 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009, China committed itself to achieve a 40%¨C45% per GDP carbon dioxide emission reduction in the near future. To reach this goal,...

We examine the contributions of the telecommunications infrastructure to economic growth in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) economies during the period from 1982 to 2003 using a modified version of the model developed by Roller and Waverman (2001). Our estimation results show that,...

In this paper, I extend the model in Coate and Loury (CL) (1993) to show how statistical discrimination by employers can help create gender wage gap for men and women with equal earning potentials. Given that employers do not perfectly observe a worker¡¯s skill type and partly rely on the...

We use household surveys from 1995, 2002, and 2007 to examine how changes in job structure contributed to China¡¯s rising urban wage inequality, considering three job characteristics: occupation, industry, and firm ownership. The explanatory power of job structure for wage inequality increased...

This paper analyzes the role of price as a signal of the quality of a monopoly firm's new product. The quality of the goods is drawn from a continuum and is unknown to consumers. We establish a unique separating equilibrium using equilibrium characterization results for signaling games. The...

In this paper we estimate relative consumer price levels as of 2008 for 36 major Chinese cities, using an innovative method purposely designed to rectify three main defects of the existing literature, which are (1) the under-representation of marketized services in the sample data, (2) biased...

This paper quantitatively analyzes the impact of money stock on optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a stochastic production economy with sticky prices. The numerical results indicate that a sufficient large quantity of money makes a noticeable difference in many aspects of optimal monetary and...

This paper presents a systematic analysis of the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) on overweight and obesity in China and investigates how and why the SES-obesity gradient differs with age. Using a longitudinal sample drawn from the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), I find that body...