经鸿之粟 | 经济学院2026年一季度高质量论文概览

How does the co-optation of foreign-educated elites influence local stability? This study exploits a quasi-experimental setting created by the establishment of provincial Consultative Bureaus in China in 1909 to examine the political consequences of integrating Japan-educated returnees into local governance. Using an original, prefecture-by-month panel dataset across 262 prefectures from 1901 to 1911, we find that co-opting foreign-educated elites produced unintended effects: it significantly reduced revolutionary armed struggles (the revolution effect), but simultaneously increased peasant revolts (the revolt effect). Mechanism analysis suggests that returnees advocated reforms that intensified local tax burdens—particularly in economically strained regions—provoking peasant revolts. Our findings underscore a critical trade-off in the modernization efforts of autocratic regimes: when elites' reformist ambitions outpace the adaptive capacity of society, well-intended reforms can generate unintended backlash.

We propose a novel concept of rationalization, called coarse rationalization, tailored for the analysis of datasets where an agent’s choices are imperfectly observed. We characterize those datasets which are rationalizable in this sense and present an efficient algorithm to verify the characterizing condition. We then demonstrate how our results can be applied through a duality approach to test the rationalizability of datasets with perfectly observed choices but imprecisely observed linear budget sets. For datasets that consist of both perfectly observed feasible sets and choices but are inconsistent with perfect rationality, our results could be used to measure the extent to which choices or prices have to be perturbed to recover rationality.

This paper studies the evaluation of non-clairvoyant dynamic mechanisms, where the designer cannot observe future information and must make sequential decisions without perfect foresight. We provide a theoretical framework to assess the performance and robustness of such mechanisms in dynamic environments. We then conduct laboratory experiments to test the theoretical predictions, examining how subjects behave under different dynamic mechanisms. Our results show that non-clairvoyant mechanisms can achieve satisfactory efficiency and stability in practice, and the experimental outcomes are largely consistent with the theoretical implications. The findings offer useful guidance for the design and application of dynamic mechanisms in real-world scenarios.

We propose a novel mechanism to mitigate the provision of public bads in large groups. In the baseline case with centralized punishment, players choose their neighbors and having more neighbors brings benefits. Each player then decides whether to provide a public bad, which yields personal benefits but imposes costs on the entire group. A small chance exists that a player providing the public bad will be detected and punished. In the responsibility-sharing mechanism, when a player is caught providing the public bad, their neighbors are also punished. Our theoretical analysis and experimental results strongly support the effectiveness of this mechanism in promoting Pareto optimal outcomes. In addition, using another experimental treatment, we determine that the mechanism is less effective in the absence of complete feedback information.

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 proinnovation, whereas orthodox Confucianism was physiocratic, antiluxury, and antiinnovation. Interpreting such distinction with the modern theories of increasing and decreasing returns, this article finds that mercantilism advocated an increasingreturn 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.

This paper explores testing unit roots based on least absolute deviations (LAD) regression under unconditional heteroskedasticity. We first derive the asymptotic properties of the LAD estimator for a first-order autoregressive process with the coefficient (local to) unity under unconditional heteroskedasticity and weak dependence, revealing that the limiting distribution of the LAD estimator (consequently the derived test statistics) is closely associated with unknown time-varying variances. To conduct feasible LAD-based unit root tests under heteroskedasticity and serial dependence, we develop an adaptive block bootstrap procedure, which accommodates time-varying volatility and serial dependence, both of unknown forms, to compute critical values for LAD-based tests. The asymptotic validity is established. We then extend the testing procedure to allow for deterministic components. Simulation results indicate that, in the presence of unconditional heteroskedasticity and serial dependence, the classic LAD-based tests demonstrate severe size distortion, whereas the proposed LAD-based bootstrap tests exhibit good size-control capability. Additionally, the newly developed tests show superior testing power in heavy-tailed distributed cases compared to considered benchmarks. Finally, empirical analysis of real effective exchange rates of 16 EU countries is conducted to illustrate the applicability of the newly proposed tests.

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.

This study introduces a lower bound that integrates the market's simple return risk-neutral variance and a combination of log-return moments to predict market log returns. A distinctive feature of the model is that the ratio of to captures crash risk, and the lower bound of log returns depends on the joint effect of crash risk and risk-neutral variance. Our in-sample analysis shows that crash risk exhibits significant predictive power for market returns, and its marginal effect differs markedly between crisis and noncrisis periods. In out-of-sample testing, we argue that crash risk outperforms several benchmarks in return prediction, while the joint effects of crash risk and variance risk achieves higher accuracy in forecasting crash events. We further demonstrate that our model delivers superior performance when the risk aversion is high, particularly during periods of crises.

本文在新凯恩斯模型框架中引入存在部门异质性的融资约束和具有违约风险的影子银行，研究影子银行对结构性货币政策实施效果的影响，以及结构性货币政策和商业银行资本监管政策的最优搭配。研究发现，影子银行能增强结构性货币政策优化商业银行信贷结构的效果。经济下行期间，最优政策组合为盯住各自目标进行逆周期调节；经济上行期间，最优资本监管政策转为顺周期调节以发挥影子银行促进结构性货币政策效果的优势。

共同富裕是社会主义的本质要求，而将其与因果推断相结合，是中国特色社会主义实践与现代计量经济学方法融合的重要探索。本文立足于因果推断理论的演进历程与最新发展，系统阐释了建立面向共同富裕问题的因果推断理论框架的必要性与可行路径。研究认为，因果推断理论经历了平均处理效应、异质性效应和数智技术创新的探索过程，但传统方法在解决当前复杂高维共同富裕问题时仍有局限。从理论和现实必要性来看，因果推断理论与共同富裕问题具有方法契合性、现实研究延展性以及理论创新相容性。未来，学者们应当以共同富裕问题激发因果推断理论创新，利用异质性因果推断促进共同富裕理论发现，同时推动面向共同富裕的因果推断数智化。本文旨在探索如何结合中国现实问题推进经济学方法论创新，为实现具有中国特色的因果推断理论发展、促进中国经济学自主知识体系构建与国际传播提供有益参考。