Pacific Economic Review

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Publisher:
Wiley
Publication date:
2021-02-01
ISBN:
1361-374X

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Latest documents

  • The persisting legacies of imperial elites among contemporary top‐ranking Vietnamese politicians

    Our study investigates how the legacies of Vietnamese imperial elites continue to affect top‐ranking politicians in Vietnam. The study compares a list of people who passed the imperial examination (1075–1919) at the national level with a list of currently active top‐ranking politicians in Vietnam (1930–2022) by matching their home districts. Using an instrumental variable approach, we find that those living in the same home districts as imperial elites are more likely to be top‐ranking communists. Possible mechanisms for these strong and persistent legacies based on home district connections include a historical culture of striving to reach the upper echelons of Vietnamese society, a belief in meritocracy, and using graduate degrees to signal one's talent.

  • The impact of intergenerational transfers on the distribution of wealth: An international comparison

    In this paper, I analyse detailed data on intergenerational transfers in four countries (China, India, Japan and the United States) from the ‘Japan Household Panel Survey on Consumer Preferences and Satisfaction (JHPS‐CPS)’ which has been conducted by the Institute of Social and Economic Research of Osaka University in these four countries since 2003, in order to shed light on the impact of intergenerational transfers on household wealth disparities and on possible reasons for the substantial differences in household wealth disparities among the four countries. Almost all of the evidence I present suggests that intergenerational transfers have a disequalising impact on household wealth disparities and promote the transmission of household wealth disparities from generation to generation in all four countries, although the magnitude of these effects varies considerably from country to country. Moreover, the evidence I present sheds considerable light on possible reasons for the substantial differences in household wealth disparities among the four countries.

  • The impact of childcare on maternal employment

    This paper re‐examines the impact of childcare availability on maternal employment in Japan, focusing on the period when childcare centre availability increased dramatically due to government policies in the 2010s aimed at boosting women's labour participation. We use data tracking mothers' employment status after childbirth, merging administrative data on the availability of both standard and nonstandard childcare centres. This is linked to each respondent via location identifiers based on their residential city and the nearest train station. The findings first show that an increase in unlicensed/nonstandard daycare availability significantly raised the proportion of mothers who return to work by the time the child reaches the age of three, particularly in areas with limited access to licensed/standard centres. Secondly, the effects may vary depending on the services offered by the centres. The results suggest that nonstandard centres, often more conveniently located and offering varied services, better meet the needs of working mothers, leading to higher employment rates. This research emphasizes that government efforts to expand childcare options in the 2010s may play a crucial role in promoting maternal labour‐force participation in Japan.

  • The effect of financial knowledge on asset allocation for Chinese households

    This paper investigates the association and causality between household financial knowledge and their corresponding financial behaviours in financial asset allocation and financial market participation. The 2014 data of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) is used to examine the financial behaviours of Chinese households. Our empirical results suggest that the level of financial knowledge is positively correlated with the number of various types of financial assets. Additionally, by utilizing a multivariate probit model with binary responses, allowing for pairwise correlations among unobservable factors, it is found that household heads with higher financial knowledge are more likely to participate in certain financial markets, such as term deposits, mutual funds and stocks. When using the instrumental variable approach, it confirms that financial knowledge has some positive impacts on the number of assets and ownership of mutual funds and stocks. We argue that financial knowledge can be a predictor of financial behaviour, but it has its limitation for market participation. The removal of institutional barriers and the improvement in information discourse in China should also be implemented to help Chinese households participate the financial market.

  • Food safety, voluntary recall and firm reputation

    Product recalls are direct remedies for producers in case of food safety problems. Unlike in the United States or other developed countries, in China, voluntary recalls are rarely documented in the food sector. The purpose of this paper is to address two questions: (1) why do firms adopt different recall strategies in different countries; (2) under what circumstances can voluntary recall help firms build up their food safety reputation? Based on the theory of collective reputation, we develop a dynamic model to incorporate firms' recall strategy and investigate the impact of such a strategy on industry collective reputation. The model takes into account production hazards: producers' lapses in food safety despite good‐faith efforts. Our results show that voluntary recall helps a firm to maintain a good historical record. Hence, firms are likely to achieve a high level of collective reputation under voluntary recall. However, a firm is willing to initiate voluntary recall only if the collective reputation is high enough. This explains the current situation in China: as consumers show little trust (belief in collective reputation is low), firms cannot recover the recall loss and thus have no incentive to initiate a voluntary recall.

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  • Middle‐income country trap and total factor productivity growth

    This study assessed the factors allowing middle‐income countries to achieve higher income levels and thus escape the middle‐income trap (MIT). By deriving a stochastic production function using the Cornwell–Schmidt–Sickles (CSS) estimator and country panel data, we successfully distinguished between growth due to total factor productivity (TFP) and that attributable to various production inputs after controlling for random shocks and cross‐sectional dependence. We found that TFP growth was the main factor distinguishing middle‐income countries that have and have not escaped from the MIT; the former countries had significantly higher TFP growth.

  • Is Hong Kong still an entrepôt under the Sino‐U.S. trade war?

    This paper studies the Hong Kong economy from a trade intermediary's perspective. Using a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) framework, we discover that trade‐related external shocks mainly affect the economy through re‐exports channel over the offshore trade channel. We observe that re‐exports shock does not transmit to the real economy through the employment channel. A puzzling phenomenon is that trade‐related employment has been in decline since 2008. Moreover, we notice that although the Sino‐U.S. trade war exerted much downward pressure on economic growth between 2018 and 2019, the trade intermediary sector swiftly recovered in 2020, reflecting the versatility of the external trade sector in Hong Kong.

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