经鸿之粟 | 经济学院2025年四季度高质量论文概览

This paper exploits China’s Water Quality Control Assessment Plan as a natural experiment to examine the impact of environmental regulation on fertilizer use and food security. Leveraging variation in enforcement incentives across counties determined by their locations relative to water quality monitoring stations, we document a 5.9 % fertilizer application reduction in upstream counties, driven by reduction in public financial support for agriculture. Salience of information highlighting agriculture as a major pollution source reinforces enforcement incentives in curbing fertilizer use. Agricultural output remained stable, reflecting both prior overuse of fertilizer and slight productivity gains likely associated with improved water quality.

We investigate whether shorter working hours can narrow the gender gap in market and domestic work by examining the impact of China's workweek reduction policy. We find that the policy deepened the gender division of labor within dual-employee households, resulting in women further leaning toward familial roles. Specifically, women allocated more time to childcare and other household chores, while men withdrew from these domestic duties, worked longer hours beyond the designated schedule, and pursued higher education. This shift contributed to improved income and career advancement for men, whereas women did not experience similar improvements. The impact of this polarized gender division of labor was particularly pronounced in households with higher demands for domestic product consumption or with higher male-female wage ratios prior to the reform. Our analysis demonstrates that under the shortened working hours system, families' optimization behavior manifests as a deepened household specialization aimed at maximizing household consumption, suggesting that the reduction in working hours may exacerbate labor market gender inequality.

This paper examines meritocratic recruitment and incentive issues within the context of China’s initial industrialization. We analyze the impact of upper-tail human capital on entrepreneurship in China between 1840 and 1904, exploring how the Imperial Examination system influenced talent allocation between traditional sectors and modern firms. Our study leverages the treaty port system as an exogenous shock to China’s industrialization, revealing heterogeneous choices made by different echelons of the upper-tail human capital. We find that traditional human capital played a diverse role in modern entrepreneurship, with some intellectuals transitioning to new opportunities while others remained entrenched in bureaucratic roles. Our findings highlight the complex interplay between civil service examinations and economic modernization, offering insights into how bureaucratic structures can influence talent reallocation and industrial development.

Robust estimation for modern portfolio selection on a large set of assets becomes more important due to the large deviation of empirical inference on big data. We propose a distributionally robust methodology for high-dimensional mean–variance portfolio problems, aiming to select an optimal conservative portfolio allocation by considering distributional uncertainty. With the help of factor structure, we extend the distributionally robust mean–variance problem investigated by Blanchet et al. (2022) to the high-dimensional scenario and transform it to a new penalized risk minimization problem. Furthermore, we propose a data-adaptive method to quantify both the uncertainty size and the lowest acceptable target return. Since the selection of these quantities requires knowledge of certain unknown population parameters, we further develop an estimation procedure, and establish its corresponding asymptotic consistency. Our Monte-Carlo simulation results show that the estimated uncertainty size and target return from the proposed procedure are very close to the corresponding oracle level, and the newly proposed robust portfolio achieves high out-of-sample Sharpe ratio. Finally, we conduct empirical studies based on the components of the S&P 500 index and the Russell 2000 index to demonstrate the superior return–risk performance of our proposed portfolio selection, in comparison with various existing strategies.

This paper reports a field experiment on Shanghai cabdrivers’ labor supply, analyzing the data using an expectations-based reference-dependent model that allows daily income- and hours-targeting. Our main innovation is to elicit the cabdrivers’ income and hours expectations, twice a day. We find that expectations indeed affect labor supply in a way predicted by a reference-dependent model, and hours expectations have a stronger influence than income expectations. Both expectations are found to be correlated with their most recent historical average values. While income expectations do adjust within the day, hours expectations are sticky. The findings suggest that the targeting effect based on hours expectations plays a more important role than traditionally thought.

We study mechanism design with flexible but costly information acquisition. There is one principal and four or more agents, who share a common prior belief over a set of payoff-relevant states. The principal proposes a mechanism to the agents, each of whom can then acquire information about the state by privately designing a signal device. As long as it is costless for each agent to acquire a signal that is independent of the state, there exists a mechanism that allows the principal to implement any social choice rule at zero information acquisition cost for the agents.

This paper examines the impact of China’s college enrollment expansion since 1999 on parental investments in children’s human capital. Utilizing a measure of expansion exposure that exploits exogenous variation in college enrollment opportunities across time and provinces, we find that the expansion has increased education levels for both mothers and fathers. Furthermore, higher exposure to the expansion for mothers significantly increased educational investments in children, while no such effect was found for fathers. Mechanism analysis shows that the results can be largely explained by the rise of mothers’ income and relative education level, which gave rise to the empowerment of mothers and explains the discrepant effects between mothers and fathers. Our study reveals a new channel through which the college enrollment expansion exerts an intergenerational influence.

In Bayesian persuasion, Receiver simply plays an action after Sender’s public signaling. However, in some applications, it seems natural that Receiver could elicit more information from Sender by offering a screening contract. We study its economic implications, mainly in a stylized binary, quasilinear environment. In the first model where Sender acquires full information as his private information, the public signal is less informative than that in Bayesian persuasion, suggesting that the public and private signals are “substitutes”. Meanwhile, both Sender and Receiver are better off than in Bayesian persuasion: Sender prefers “being further screened”. In the second model where Sender jointly designs both public and private signals, he sometimes finds it more profitable to have less precise private information. The outcome is most efficient (both in terms of information and welfare) with the first model, less so with the second model, and least in Bayesian persuasion. This suggests that economic predictions based on the standard Bayesian persuasion model might be biased toward overly inefficient outcomes.

We investigate the impact of education on stemming human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) infection. Using China’s Compulsory Schooling Law (CSL) as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that mass education significantly enhances knowledge about HIV/AIDS, and that each additional year of exposure to the CSL reduces HIV/AIDS contraction and mortality rates by 6.51 % and 2.15 %, respectively. Further analyses suggest that these reductions are primarily driven by a reduction in blood-borne transmission. In contrast, the effect of CSL on sexual transmission is ambiguous. Drawing on detailed data on individuals’ sexual behaviors and attitudes toward sex and fertility, we find that the CSL significantly lowers women’s desired fertility without affecting that of men. Consequently, women become the more active contraception seekers within households, leading to a substitution of female-controlled contraceptive methods for condoms. This behavioral shift may increase the risk of sexually transmitted infections, potentially offsetting or even muting the CSL’s positive effect on reducing the sexual transmission of HIV/AIDS.

In this paper, we consider a class of strategy-form games, where the agents play a noncooperative game and a cooperative game concurrently. In this model, we introduce the notion of equilibria, and prove the equilibrium existence theorem with finitely many agents and finite dimensional strategy spaces by the result of Bonnisseau and Iehl (2007). Furthermore, we provide a generalization to strategy-form games with infinite dimensional strategy spaces. Finally, we define the weak equilibrium concept for strategy-form games with infinitely many agents, noncooperative and cooperative frameworks, and prove the weak equilibrium existence theorem.

货币政策的精准实施和有效传导是推进经济高质量发展和科学宏观调控的重要保障，也是近年来宏观领域的前沿议题。本文将信息驱动理论与货币政策框架相结合，利用高维稀疏建模方法从央行沟通和新闻报道文本中识别出叙事性冲击，并进一步运用格兰杰因果检验、高维TVP-VAR模型和平滑区制转移局部投影方法研究央行沟通向新闻媒体、经济主体和实体经济的信息扩散过程。研究结果表明，央行沟通产生的叙事性冲击与其推行的货币政策立场高度一致，且在经济改革和政策实施的关键时点，央行能将宏观调控、政策变动与经济形势等信息有效地传导至新闻媒体。进一步地，新闻媒体在央行沟通的信息扩散过程中发挥着重要作用，当央行沟通向新闻媒体的信息溢出渠道通畅时，央行沟通中的利率调控与数量调控信息能有效地管理预期和调控实体经济，但当央行沟通向新闻媒体的信息溢出渠道受阻时，两类调控的成效都被明显削弱。本研究为叙事性冲击识别及其传导机制的研究提供了新的思路和可行方法，也为宏观调控体系的升级优化提供了借鉴。

本研究在分位数回归框架下探讨了偏线性分位数模型中存在样本选择时的模型识别与估计问题.为解决分位数回归中因样本选择问题引发的选择偏误，研究通过对结果方程和选择方程中不可观测扰动项的联合分布进行建模(如采用Copula函数)实现了有效修正.文中给出了模型识别的假设，结合分位数回归广义矩估计方法给出了分位数参数(函数)以及Copula参数的估计步骤，并且给出了估计量的一致性和渐近正态性.统计推断方面，研究采用非参数自助法估计标准误，并构建检验统计量来验证非线性设定的合理性.此外，基于控制函数方法，本研究建立了内生线性分位数选择模型与本研究模型之间的联系.通过蒙特卡洛模拟发现估计量在有限样本情形下表现良好.最后，本研究将估计方程和检验方法应用于分析女性教育回报率的实际问题，展现了本模型的实用价值。

经济现代化是近代中国经济社会发展的核心线索与关键命题。通过构建“要素禀赋—价值权衡—国家力量”的分析框架，可以对２０世纪３０至４０年代中国知识界关于经济现代化问题的讨论内容和思想脉络进行梳理和分析。研究发现，这一时期的学者们以对中国经济禀赋条件的基本认知为逻辑起点，所提出的农业优先战略、工业化战略及重工业赶超战略等中国经济现代化的实现路径，是基于民生改善、发展模式转型和保障经济安全等多元价值目标之间的侧重权衡，并且考量了国家力量在经济现代化进程中的重要作用及其应具备的能力要求，有其内在的基本逻辑。这一时期知识界关于经济现代化问题的深入思考，不仅构成了对具有中国特色的现代化道路的早期理论探索，也为新时代推进中国式现代化的历史进程提供了宝贵的思想借鉴与历史启迪。