This study investigates the impact of the 2008–2009 subprime crisis on long-term financial satisfaction, addressing the gap in literature on early-career financial shocks and their connection to future financial attitudes. Using data from the seventh wave of the World Values Survey covering the period from 2017 to 2021, we employ a cohort difference-in-differences method to examine how financial shocks experienced during early career years influence long-term financial satisfaction. Our analysis reveals that individuals exposed to the crisis during their early career report higher levels of financial satisfaction over time, highlighting factors such as age, culture, religion, and work attitudes as influential mechanisms. These findings offer new insights into psychological factors as additional drivers of utility beyond consumption and provide implications for incorporating early-life experiences into the basis of welfare analysis in policy-making.

The substitution and complementarity of industries have been the focus of scholars. Taking the 2014 Occupy Central movement of Hong Kong as a natural experiment, we identify regional and industrial spillover effects of tourism. Results indicate that the political shock harmed the number of visitors to Hong Kong and had a spillover effect on the neighborhood. In detail, a 1% change in demand for tourism in Hong Kong leads to a 0.85% change in the adjacent city, Macao. As Macao is a world-famous gaming center, our study implies that complementarity, rather than substitution, exists between the gaming and general leisure and hospitality industries. This study provides new evidence of the industrial and regional externalities from the perspective of external political shock.

In this study, we use data from Chinese General Social Survey to investigate the impact of religion on fertility preference in the biggest transitional country. Our Results reveal a positive impact of religious faith on fertility preference after controlling individual, family, and social factors. We show the effects of religion on fertility as follow: (i) robust when considering Chinese cultural background, applying other continuous and discrete regression strategies, and dealing with endogeneity problem; (ii) more significant among Christians and Muslims; (iii) stronger for females in the high-income group; (iv) mainly driven by influences from the institutionalization of religious faith and the frequency of participation in religious activities. Our findings suggest that religion effects on fertility preference still exist in a non-religion-dominated country such as China.

This paper studies the impact of tariff cuts on workers’ wages in a single labor market by examining the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) trade liberalization, in which China unilaterally eliminated hundreds of tariffs on Hong Kong’s goods in 2004. Utilizing five Hong Kong censuses from 1996 to 2016, we find consistent result that a one-sided tariff concession leads to an increase in the monthly wage of affected workers, averaging between 5.75% and 6.84%. Moreover, we explore the possibility that the effects of exposure to CEPA may be heterogeneous along several dimensions. The workers who benefited the most were more educated, in higher-skilled occupations, Mandarin-speaking, near retirement, or just starting their careers. Surprisingly, we found no increase in employment in the treated industries. We conclude that tariff cuts’ wage impact and, hence, their impact on wage inequality, depend on the local labor market composition and structure.

This study investigates the influence of external political shock under a special institutional endowment brought by a high degree of autonomy, taking Macao as an example. Macao monopolizes gambling industry in China under the arrangement of “One country, Two systems” and depends heavily on tourists from Mainland China. To illustrate the problem under such an institutional endowment, this study estimates the impact of the decline in casino consumption caused by the 2014 anti-corruption campaign in Mainland China, by employing the difference in differences and synthetic control approaches. The results indicate that Macao experienced approximately three years of decline in the revenue growth of the gambling industry, which is nearly 231 billion MOP, under the political shock. Thus, an economy with institutional endowment may also face uncertainties caused by exogenous political shock. This paper contributes to the extension of the concept related to the tourism-induced Dutch disease.

This study investigates the effect of political support in the United Nations on international trade by taking the votes on the representation of China as a case study. We document a strongly positive link between political support toward the People's Republic of China and bilateral trade in the next year. This conclusion is robust when we consider different quantitative methods, sample selections, and dataset. In addition, the results still holds when the interest similarity with Albania is applied as an instrumental variable to solve the problem of endogeneity.

On the basis of a natural experiment related to the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, the present work empirically analyzes the relationship between historical events and current attitude and determines whether regions that suffered severely during the Japanese invasion in World War II expressed small concern during the earthquake. After controlling for geographical distance, bilateral trade, and political characteristics, a negative relationship is found between the duration of invasion and number of related deaths in the invaded regions and their governments’ efforts in assisting Japan after the earthquake. Further analysis shows that political similarity to Japan helped in assisting them after the earthquake, but this effect was reduced for regions that sustained many deaths during the Japanese invasion. In addition, a mediation effect test shows that the help extended by Japan to several countries after the war through the Japanese official development assistance did not positively influence the amount of aid provided by such regions to Japan after the earthquake. These studies provide new evidence of the long-lasting influence of war. However, no robust evidence is found about the relationship between death rate and war memory. Therefore, even large countries cannot tolerate serious suffering during painful historical events.

This paper revisits the issue of trade creation effects in multi-stage FTAs. Different from many empirical studies carried by gravity equation in this field, we apply triple DID approach to solve the shortcomings of them, which are factor omitted and endogeneity. After the identification of treatment and control at the 8-digit HS code product level, the regression analysis results show that there are no significant trade creation effects in the FTAs, suggesting that the role of FTAs may be a signaling to some extent, which is more than trade.