经鸿之粟｜经济学院2026年二季度高质量论文概览

We provide the first evidence that the employers of network contacts from college can influence job search success. In contrast to the peer effects literature that emphasizes peer characteristics, we examine how the hiring rate of in-network firms affects reemployment probabilities. To avoid endogeneity from voluntary transitions, we focus on individuals who experience mass layoffs. Using administrative data and a cross-cohort design, we find that network connections with actively hiring employers increase the reemployment rate. This result is driven by reemployment at contacts’ firms. These results suggest that college can improve employment outcomes beyond improved human capital and signaling.

Perfect equilibrium and its refinements are widely studied and typically rely on full-support perturbations. We introduce a δ-localized notion of perfection for games with a continuum of players. It confines perturbations within a δ-neighborhood of the underlying action distribution and eliminates undesirable equilibria from a local perspective. We establish the existence of a pure strategy δ-localized perfect equilibrium and show that it is equivalent to δ-admissible Nash equilibrium. We also study limit versions of δ-localized perfection. Illustrative applications to large routing games and crowd saturation games are presented.

This study investigates the causal effect of prenatal air pollution on height in adulthood. We employ a two-stage least squares model, using thermal inversions as an instrumental variable for identification. Leveraging data from a nationally representative sample in China, the results show that an increase of 1 μg/m3 in PM2.5 concentrations during gestation reduces height in adulthood by 0.4 cm and normalized height scores by 0.07 standard deviations. These adverse effects on height are primarily driven by exposure to air pollution during the first and second trimesters of pregnancy. Furthermore, the results show that exposure to air pollution after birth does not significantly impact adult height. The mechanism analysis indicates that income reductions that are associated with air pollution are unlikely to be the main pathway through which prenatal air pollution affects long-term height outcomes. Instead, disruptions to maternal health during pregnancy appear to be the dominant mechanism.

We examine the impact of traditional beliefs on spousal matching in China, focusing on the role of the zodiac compatibility system, which predicts a couple’s potential compatibility into three types: good, bad, and neutral. Using observational data from the population census, we document that couples with bad compatibility are significantly less prevalent than those with neutral compatibility, while good compatibility has an insignificant positive effect. To shed light on the mechanism, we use an incentivized online survey experiment to elicit individual-level evaluations of potential matches based on zodiac compatibility, where the findings are consistent with the observational analysis. Lastly, we also examine the cost of the culture, where the results show that individuals facing a "worse" marriage market regarding zodiac compatibility are more likely to remain single.

This paper studies how international marriage migration affects sex ratios at birth in Vietnam. Leveraging a unique context in which the opportunity for Vietnamese women to migrate to wealthier East Asian countries increased the economic benefits of having daughters, we employ a difference-in-differences approach using a demand-driven visa processing change from Taiwan to examine whether Vietnamese households became less likely to have sons. We find a significant reduction in the likelihood of male births in affected provinces, with two fewer boys per hundred girls. We observe a decline for both first- and second-born children, with a stronger effect for the second-born when the first-born is a girl. These findings are consistent with a model incorporating both lexicographic (“at least one son”) and standard son preferences and are inconsistent with either preference alone. This highlights the nuanced role of household preferences in shaping sex selection. Overall, our results underscore the potential of policies that enhance daughters’ economic value to address gender imbalances at birth.

This article studies the comparison between mercantilism and orthodox Confucianism, two kinds of political economy which respectively dominated many important European countries and China in the early modern period. This article finds that mercantilism was industrialistic, proluxury, and pro-innovation, whereas orthodox Confucianism was physiocratic, antiluxury, and anti-innovation. Interpreting such distinction with the modern theories of increasing and decreasing returns, this article finds that mercantilism advocated an increasing-return strategy of economic development, but orthodox Confucianism insisted upon the economic path of decreasing returns. This article believes that such distinction can be added as a parameter to the discussion about the Great Divergence, because, as the Great Divergence was driven by the divergence between the behaviors of early modern European and Chinese states, this article presents that such divergence between the behaviors of states happened in the context of the divergence between the political economy that guided the behaviors of states.

Market integration is vital for economic development; its determinants have been extensively documented in the literature. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of economic organizations. This paper seeks to fill this gap by investigating the role of futures exchanges in Republican China. Using manually collected primary data, we employ a continuous difference-in-differences approach to analyze the impact of the Chinese Cotton Goods Exchange on long-distance market integration. We find that, following the exchange's establishment in 1921, geographically distant cities experienced a stronger increase in market integration with Shanghai than nearby cities. Regarding the underlying mechanism, we show that the price-discovery function of the futures exchange promoted long-distance market integration by centralizing markets and reducing price uncertainty.

This paper proposes a unified framework for equilibrium existence in strategic-form games. Using the unified method, we prove several noncooperative and cooperative equilibrium existence theorems in strategic-form games with infinite-dimensional strategy spaces, by aid of equilibrium existence theorems with finite-dimensional strategy spaces. The novel proof technique is the principal contribution rather than existence results.

共同富裕是中国式现代化的重要特征，如何在促进经济增长的同时改善低收入群体福利，成为当前政策关注的核心议题之一。本文聚焦新型基础设施建设的共同富裕效应，提出以尾部平均处理效应为核心的政策评估框架，用于直接衡量政策对收入分布尾端个体的影响，从而在统一框架下同时检验政策的增长效应与再分配效应，并给出其潜在的政策优化路径。结果显示，新型基础设施建设不仅显著提升了整体居民收入，而且对低收入群体的增收作用更为突出，体现了其推动经济发展与改善收入分配的双重功能。区分收入来源的检验表明，新型基础设施提高低收入人群收入、缩小收入差距的作用主要通过影响工资性收入来实现。反事实分析进一步发现，在以实体经济为主导的地区，加快新型基础设施建设能更有效地促进低收入人群收入增长，反映了数实融合与共同富裕目标的一致性。本文提出的以尾部平均处理效应为核心的共同富裕效应评估框架是构建中国特色政策评估计量经济学的努力和尝试。

人工智能的快速发展正在深刻重塑劳动力的空间分布格局。文章基于2020年第七次全国人口普查和2015年全国1%人口抽样调查微观数据，从宏观区域和微观个体两个层面探究了人工智能对劳动力流动的影响和潜在机制，并重点检验影响的技能异质性。研究发现，人工智能发展对劳动力流动总体上具有“虹吸—锁定”效应。宏观层面上，人工智能发展提高了劳动力迁入率；微观层面上，人工智能发展提高了人口流入的概率，并降低流动人口流出的概率。人工智能对不同受教育程度劳动力流动的影响呈“U形”，即其对高学历和低学历劳动力流动的吸引作用强于中等学历劳动力。机制分析发现，人工智能发展通过增加流动人口的就业机会，从而吸引其迁入并降低其流出概率。“U形”影响则源于人工智能引发的就业“极化”，人工智能发展促进了流动人口在高技能知识密集型行业和低技能非常规型服务行业就业，但减少了其在制造业、采矿业等以中等技能为主的常规任务型行业就业。文章揭示了人工智能发展早期阶段对劳动力流动的结构性影响，为理解人工智能初期冲击下的劳动力流动规律、优化劳动力要素配置及促进区域协调发展提供了经验证据。