Consumption

  • 详情 Synergistic Driving Mechanisms of Full Guaranteed Purchase and Tradable Green Certificates Systems on Renewable Energy Integration
    The Full Guaranteed Purchase System began to replace the subsidy system as the core policy for promoting renewable energy integration, designating grid companies as the sole entity responsible for the physical integration of renewable energy. Meanwhile, the Tradable Green Certificates system provides environmental benefits for renewable power generators through market mechanisms. Therefore, exploring the strategic choices of various entities under the dual policy interventions, and uncovering the mechanisms for realizing electricity energy value and green value under different integration models, is of great significance for advancing China’s renewable energy integration. Based on China’s actual conditions, this study integrates the features of both policies and constructs a three-party evolutionary game model involving government, power generators, and grid enterprises to simulate their interactions and identify key factors influencing strategic choices. The results show that active government regulation effectively encourages positive strategies from both generators and grid companies, and that active power integration by grid companies further promotes green power generation. A “stepwise complementary” relationship exists among reputation gains, reputation losses, and regulatory costs: higher reputation gains can offset decision-making resistance arising from increased regulatory costs. Green power generation costs and innovation costs have significant negative effects on strategic choices, while the guaranteed purchase price has a significant positive effect on generators’ active strategies. The penalty parameter plays a key positive role in grid companies’ active strategies, and the guaranteed purchase price significantly influences their active integration behavior. This paper provides recommendations for motivating all entities actively participate in the consumption process.
  • 详情 Alcohol consumption and the value of community
    his article investigates the value of access to alcohol consumption by examining housing price changes after a liquor ban that was catalyzed by an unexpected riot in Singapore. The ban restricts alcohol consumption in liquor control zones further than in areas outside such zones. We find that the housing price changes in the liquor control zones were weak, which implies that the utility and disutility of alcohol consumption almost cancel each other out. In contrast, housing prices increased for houses within 800 m of but outside the liquor control zones. We investigate potential explanations for these phenomena.
  • 详情 Family Long Cycle Hypothesis:Intergenerational Liquidity Lock-in,Uncertainty Multiplier,and China’s Fertility Dilemma
    Why do fertility subsidies consistently fail in China? Why do consumptionand fertility collapse globally despite intact household book wealth? This paper proposes the Family Long Cycle Hypothesis (FLCH), extending thedecision-making unit of the life cycle hypothesis from an individual to an intergenerational family network, and expanding the budget constraint from a singlelifetime resource constraint to a dual constraint of “total resources + liquiditystructure”. The core mechanism is: intergenerational “blood-transfusion” homepurchase locks in network liquidity without changing household net assets, completing a balance sheet morph of “book wealth unharmed, decision-making paralyzed” at the moment of purchase. This liquidity depletion spikes effective riskaversion, forming a multiplier effect with income uncertainty, causing fertility—the irreversible commitment with the longest duration—to enter the corner solution region first. Within this region, the elasticity of fertility decisions to costsubsidies is strictly zero, but they remain highly sensitive to liquidity repairand uncertainty reduction. Consequently, this paper proves the fundamentalmechanism difference between consumption subsidies (cash rewards, childcarefee waivers) and capital transfers (mortgage principal write-down, unconditionalcash transfers), and proposes three effective policy directions: reducing incomeuncertainty, repairing family liquidity, and raising the reference income of thebottom 90% of the population. The model nests the standard life cycle hypothesis as a special case and is distinguishable from the competitive saving hypothesis on six pairs of opposing predictions. The theory also explains theasymmetric “fast-falling, slow-rising” adjustment of housing prices: the drop isdriven by defensive behavior (business cycle scale), while the recovery is constrained by intergenerational liquidity reconstruction (intergenerational scale of10–20 years).
  • 详情 The Impact of China's Digital Financial Inclusion on Multidimensional Poverty of Households
    Does digital financial inclusion alleviate poverty? This study investigates this question by integrating the Digital Financial Inclusion Index of Peking University with microdata from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) to examine how the expansion of digital financial inclusion affects household multidimensional poverty in China. Anchored in Amartya Sen ’ s capability approach and operationalized through the Alkire–Foster (A–F) framework, the study identifies multidimensional poverty across five key dimensions: income, health, education, insurance, and living standards. Probit models are employed to estimate how digital financial inclusion influences both the likelihood and structure of multidimensional poverty, while instrumental variable techniques are used to address potential endogeneity. Beyond the average effects, the study further explores the mechanisms through which digital financial inclusion contributes to poverty alleviation, focusing on three channels—promoting household consumption, increasing financial investment, and enhancing access to credit. The results reveal that digital financial inclusion significantly mitigates multidimensional poverty, particularly by improving income, living standards, and health outcomes, though its effects on education and insurance are limited. These findings underscore the transformative role of digital finance in fostering inclusive growth, suggesting that policies expanding digital financial infrastructure and literacy can amplify its poverty-reducing effects and advance equitable development.
  • 详情 Reinforcement Learning and Trading on Noise in Limit Order Markets
    This paper introduces reinforcement learning to examine the effect of trading on noise in a dynamic limit order market equilibrium. It shows that intensive noise liquidity provision (consumption) increases speculators' liquidity consumption (provision), improving (reducing) market liquidity. Channeled by uninformed chasing and informed aggressive liquidity provision, the increasing noise liquidity provision and consumption, respectively, improve price efficiency, generating a U-shaped price efficiency to the noise trading uncertainty on liquidity provision and consumption. Associated with a hump-shaped (U-shaped) profitability for the informed (uninformed) at a U-shaped noise trading cost in the noise trading uncertainty, this implies that, at increasing noise trading cost, intensive noise liquidity provision improves market liquidity, price efficiency, order profitability of informed traders, and reduces the loss, even makes profit, for uninformed traders.
  • 详情 The Impact of the High-Tech Industry Total Factor Productivity on Household Consumption from the Perspective of Biased Technological Progress: A Sequential Proportional NDDF-Luenberger index
    This study investigates the impact of Total Factor Productivity(TFP) growth in China's high-tech industry on household consumption, examining the distinct roles of labor and capital factor productivity from the perspective of biased technological progress. We innovatively construct a sequential proportional NDDF-Luenberger index. This index not only provides a theoretically consistent measure of TFP but also enables its precise decomposition into labor factor productivity and capital factor productivity, allowing for the quantitative identification of the degree and direction of technological bias. Our analysis yields three key findings. First, China's high-tech industry TFP evolved through a three-phase pattern of "surge–retreat–recovery," characterized by persistent capital-biased technological progress. Second, at the national level, improvements in overall TFP, labor factor productivity, and capital factor productivity all significantly promote household consumption, validating the theoretical pathway where supply-side efficiency gains stimulate demand. Third, significant regional heterogeneity exists: the Eastern region exhibits a "capital-led" growth pattern with weaker consumption effects from labor productivity; the Central and Western regions show "factor synergy," where both productivities contribute to consumption; whereas the Northeastern region suffers from a blocked transmission mechanism, where technological progress fails to significantly boost local consumption due to insufficient integration with the regional economy. By integrating supply-side TFP with demand-side consumption through the lens of biased technological progress, this research provides critical insights for fostering a virtuous cycle between innovation and domestic demand, offering valuable implications for industrial and regional policy design aimed at sustainable and inclusive growth.
  • 详情 Unveiling the role of rational inattention: Tax incentives and participation in commercial pension insurance
    This paper examines why tax incentives fail to stimulate participation in China's third-pillar commercial pension insurance, emphasizing the role of rational inattention. Using household survey data from China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) spanning 2014-2022 and a difference-in-differences-in-differences (DDD) design, we find that pilot policy generated a statistically insignificant average effect on participation, with rational inattention - proxied by financial literacy - explaining much of its ineffectiveness. We develop a dynamic consumption-portfolio model featuring costly information acquisition, and then resolve limitations of standard models through a dynamic framework with distinct savings channels and policy-focused rational inattention. The models show that rational inattention distorts perceptions of tax benefits and wage growth, raising participation costs, while multiple savings channels dilute incentives. Only households with higher financial literacy substantially respond to the policy. Our results reveal how cognitive frictions undermine pension reform and offer implications for designing behaviorally-informed retirement schemes.
  • 详情 Industrial Transformation for Synergistic Carbon and Pollutant Reduction in China: Using Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output Model and Multi-Objective Optimization
    China faces significant environmental challenges, including reducing pollutants, improving environmental quality, and peaking carbon emissions. Industrial restructuring is key to achieving both emission reductions and economic transformation. This study uses the Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input-Output model and multi-objective optimization to analyze pathways for China’s industrial transformation to synergistically reduce emissions. Our findings indicate that under a compromise scenario, China’s carbon emissions could stabilize at around 10.9 billion tonnes by 2030, with energy consumption controlled at approximately 5 billion tonnes. The Papermaking sector in Guangdong and the Chemicals sector in Shandong are expected to flourish, while the Coal Mining sector in Shanxi and the Communication Equipment sector in Jiangsu will see reductions. The synergy strength between carbon emission reduction and energy conservation is highest at 11%, followed by a 7% synergy between carbon emission and nitrogen oxide reduction. However, significant trade-offs are observed between carbon emission reduction and chemical oxygen demand, and ammonia nitrogen reduction targets at -9%. This comprehensive analysis at regional and sectoral levels provides valuable insights for advancing China’s carbon reduction and pollution control goals.
  • 详情 FinTech and Consumption Resilience to Uncertainty Shocks: Evidence from Digital Wealth Management in China
    Developing countries are taking advantage of FinTech tools to provide more people with convenient access to financial market investment through digital wealth management. Using COVID-19 as an uncertainty shock, we examine whether and how digital wealth management affects the resilience of consumption to shocks based on a unique micro dataset provided by a leading Big Tech platform, Alipay in China. We find that digital wealth management mitigates the response of consumption to uncertainty shocks: residents who participate in digital wealth management, especially in risky asset investments, have a lower reduction in consumption. Importantly, digital wealth management helps improve financial inclusion, with a more pronounced mitigation effect among residents with lower-level wealth, living in less developed areas, and those with lower-level conventional finance accessibility. The mitigation effect works through the wealth channel: those who allocate a larger proportion of risky assets in their portfolio and obtain a higher realized return show more resilience of consumption to negative shocks. We also find that digital wealth management substitutes for conventional bank credit but serves as a complement to FinTech credit in smoothing consumption during uncertainty shocks. Digital wealth management provides a crucial way to improve financial inclusion and the resilience of consumption to shocks.
  • 详情 Chinese Housing Market Sentiment Index: A Generative AI Approach and An Application to Monetary Policy Transmission
    We construct a daily Chinese Housing Market Sentiment Index by applying GPT-4o to Chinese news articles. Our method outperforms traditional models in several validation tests, including a test based on a suite of machine learning models. Applying this index to household-level data, we find that after monetary easing, an important group of homebuyers (who have a college degree and are aged between 30 and 50) in cities with more optimistic housing sentiment have lower responses in non-housing consumption, whereas for homebuyers in other age-education groups, such a pattern does not exist. This suggests that current monetary easing might be more effective in boosting non-housing consumption than in the past for China due to weaker crowding-out effects from pessimistic housing sentiment. The paper also highlights the need for complementary structural reforms to enhance monetary policy transmission in China, a lesson relevant for other similar countries. Methodologically, it offers a tool for monitoring housing sentiment and lays out some principles for applying generative AI models, adaptable to other studies globally.