Tariffs on agricultural products fell sharply in China both prior to, and as a consequence of, China's accession to the WTO. The paper examines the nature of agricultural trade reform in China since 1981, and finds that protection was quite strongly negative for most commodities, and...

As China transforms from a socialist planned economy to a market-oriented economy, its returns to education are expected to rise to meet those found in middle-income established market economies. This study employs a plausible instrument for education: the China Compulsory Education Law of 1986....

EdTech which includes online education, computer assisted learning (CAL), and remote instruction was expanding rapidly even before the current full-scale substitution for in-person learning at all levels of education around the world because of the coronavirus pandemic. Studies of CAL...

Do minimum wages affect economic outcomes beyond low-skill employment? This paper develops a new model with heterogeneous firms under perfect competition in a Heckscher-Ohlin setting to show that a binding minimum wage raises product prices, encourages substitution away from labor, and creates...

The ‘China shock’ operated in part through the housing market, which is one reason why its impact was so large in the United States. We add housing to a multi-region monopolistic competition model, with individuals choosing whether and where to work. Controlling for housing reduces the...

The latest World Bank estimates of real GDP per capita for China are significantly lower than previous ones. We review possible sources of this puzzle and conclude that it reflects a combination of factors, including substitution bias in consumption, reliance on urban prices which we estimate...

In this paper we develop a monopolistic competition model where firms exercise their market power across multiple products. Even with CES preferences, markups are endogenous. Firms choose their optimal product scope by balancing the net profits from a new variety against the costs of...

Recent research has demonstrated the importance of institutional quality at the country level for both the volume of trade and the ability to trade in differentiated goods that rely on contract enforcement. This paper takes advantage of cross-provincial variation in institutional quality in...

We examine the employment responses to import competition from China and to global export expansion from the United States, both of which have been expanding strongly during the past decades. We find that although Chinese imports reduce jobs, at both the industry level and the local commuting...

This paper shows that how firms export (directly or indirectly via intermediaries) matters. We develop and estimate a dynamic discrete choice model that allows learning-by-exporting on the cost and demand side as well as sunk/fixed costs to differ by export mode. We find that demand and...