Research

We investigate the inter-generational impact of a universal social pension program in China, the New Rural Social Pension Scheme (NRPS), on grandchildren’s birth outcomes. Taking advantage of the discontinuous change of eligibility for NRPS at age 60, we find that full exposure in utero to NRPS eligibility for older adults increases grandchildren’s birthweight by 0.12-0.15 kilograms, and reduces child low birthweight rate by 5%-6%. The effects are robust to various specifications of the regression discontinuity design. We incorporate the event study approach into the regression discontinuity strategy and find female newborns exposed to the NRPS eligibility in utero gain more birthweight than males after the national roll-out of NRPS. Children born in lower-income households benefit more from the program.

This study updates the evidence regarding the income-happiness relationship in China over the past two decades. Using national representative data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) waves 2003-2021, the study reveals a substantial increase in average happiness alongside steady real income growth. Income growth contributes to approximately 28% of rural residents' happiness improvement and 22% of that of urban residents during this period. We find the correlation of income with happiness is positive and robust when examined using both regional aggregate data and individual data, in both long-term and short-term analysis. However, the importance of income in influencing happiness declines constantly over time, in terms of both the gradient and the predictive power. The trend is common for subgroups divided by income level, gender, and urban-rural residency. Non-economic factors like education and marriage become increasingly important. Furthermore, the study finds a negligible correlation between local average income and happiness and highlights the persistent urban-rural happiness gap.

Relative to the rest of the world, shipping delays have been a problem in the US even prior to COVID-19 but became more publicized and exacerbated during the pandemic. While previous studies have focused on COVID-19 shocks using event study methods, we quantify the effect of congestion, measured as the monthly average number of day delays, on U.S. agricultural container exports using monthly export data from U.S. ports. Our results show that container congestion reduces monthly exports of agricultural products by 77 thousand metric tons and $43.6 million during the pre-pandemic period 2016-2019. For 2020-2021, these losses increase to 200 thousand metric tons and $100 million. Western ports, in particular, experience the most pronounced losses across all regions, especially on bulk commodity exports with an average monthly loss of $81.6 million after the pandemic and $26.3 million for the pre-pandemic level. After the pandemic, the total loss in quantity of Western ports accounts for over 90% of the sum of all US ports, and the loss in value accounts for over 70%.

 Armington elasticities, the elasticity of substitution between goods from different coun-tries, are key parameters in agricultural trade policy evaluation and welfare calculation. Micro-elasticities refer to elasticities of substitution between varieties of products by country and are needed for evaluating the impact of tariffs imposed on a country’s ex-ports in a trade war. Macro-elasticites refer to the elasticity of substitution between home and foreign goods in aggregate and provide needed information for change in trade due to a change in tariffs on all partners.  Clearly, the micro and macro-elasticities should be related. This paper extends and applies the Feenstra (2018) ap-proach to simultaneously estimating micro and macro elasticites within the same framework to 38 agricultural commodities in 5 categories by compiling a sample of 118 countries’ production and trade flows. We estimate both the micro-elasticity of substi-tution between foreign sources of imports and the macro-elasticity of substitution be-tween home and imported products at the commodity level. The median of the micro- and macro-elasticities are 6.4 and 5.0, respectively. Meat products have the lowest mi-cro- and macro-elasticities, with the micro-elasticities ranging from 4.2 (pork) to 5.0 (poultry) and the macro-elasticities ranging from 2.9 (pork) to 4.5 (beef). Crops prod-ucts have the widest range of Armington elasticities, with micro-elasticities ranging from 2.5 (pigeon peas) to 90.3 (peanuts), and macro-elasticities ranging from 1.2 (pigeon peas) to 20.1 (peanuts). In line with the literature, we find that 75 percent of the agricultural commodities have numerically smaller macro-elasticities than micro-elasticities, even though only 6 of them (pork, poultry, corn, peanuts, apples, and peppers) are statisti-cally smaller at the 5 percent level. We explore the robustness of our estimates by slicing the sample into separate periods and importing countries. Finally, we discuss the policy implications of our estimates on predicting trade due to tariff changes and understand-ing welfare gains from agricultural trade.