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 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.