This paper quantifies the impact of rural–urban migration on agricultural fires, a major source of air pollution in China. Using satellite records and census data, we exploit an exogenous trade shock that raised manufacturing labor demand in destination prefec-tures, drawing workers from origin counties through established migration networks. A one-percentage-point increase in rural labor emigration in 2010 led to a 5% rise in agricultural fires from 2011 to 2017. The effect stems from reduced agricultural labor, which incentivizes fire use as a labor-saving clearing method. Consistent with this mech-anism, we find no effect from non-agricultural emigration or from migration to nearby areas where return farming remains feasible, with the strongest impact during harvest seasons. Institutional reforms, particularly land titling programs, significantly mitigate the problem by enhancing tenure security, enabling farmland reallocation, and reducing reliance on fire—proving more effective than nationwide administrative bans.

Farmland transfer in developing countries is characterized by informal contracts. Rich research typically attributes this phenomenon to the lack of property rights and rarely emphasizes the influence of land characteristics themselves. Utilizing plot-level data from 2017-2019 collected in Yangshan County, China, we evaluate the impact of land consolidation on the farmland transfer market transformation. We find that land consolidation has a positive impact on the transformation of farmland transfer markets, instead of its scale expansion. After land consolidation, the scope of transaction partners extends from relationship-based households to anonymous new agricultural operating entities; the transfer rent shifts from being free of charge to being paid; and the transfer duration shifts from short-term to long-term. Mechanism analysis reveals that land consolidation increases land value and reduces transaction costs by improving the endowment of farmland resources, thus driving the farmland transfer market transformation. Further exploration warns that market transformation caused by land consolidation may trigger non-grain farming, leading to a 15.2% reduction in the rice planting area and posing potential risks to food security. These findings enrich the existing studies that only focus on the impact of land rights reform, both theoretically and empirically. In practice, it has important policy implications for countries facing similar difficulties in the farmland transfer market as China.

High-quality development of water conservancy (HDWC) is of critical value for safeguarding the stability of production systems, livelihoods, and ecosystems. As the digital revolution intersects with China’s “dual carbon” targets, development of water conservancy must transition from traditional engineering approaches to data-driven ecological models. Drawing on institutional logic theory and employing dynamic qualitative comparative analysis across 30 Chinese provinces, this study examines how digital ecology facilitates the HDWC. The findings reveal that none of digital government, digital infrastructure, digital economy, digital capability, or digital society constitutes a necessary condition for the HDWC. Instead, it is the result of the combined effects of multiple institutional logics. Five configurations leading to HDWC are identified and categorized into four types: government-market-driven model, government-market-society-driven model, market-society-driven model, and government-society-driven model. The consistency of the configurations significantly increased during the study period. Furthermore, their distribution showed substantial regional differences. There are two configurations that inhibit the HDWC, namely the government-market-absence type and the market-society-absence type. Digital society emerges as a critical factor. This research uncovers multiple pathways through which digital ecology can empower HDWC, providing valuable insights for optimizing regional digital environments.

Firm survival, as a key indicator of regional economic resilience, has gained increasing attention in the context of global economic uncertainty and the deep adjustments in industrial structures. In the Pearl River Delta (PRD), a core region of China’s Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, the characteristics of firm life cycles are crucial for understanding spatial development inequalities and institutional effects in emerging economies. This study focuses on firms in the PRD, using full life-cycle data from registration, operation, to deregistration. An XGBoost regression model is employed, incorporating the SHAP explanation algorithm, to systematically analyze the main factors influencing firm survival. The results show that: (1) Firm establishment time is the primary factor influencing survival, with significant “survival threshold” and “growth leap” effects—mature firms exhibit a distinct survival advantage; (2) Among spatial structure variables, moderate industry specialization and diversity enhance firm survival rates, while excessive concentration and diversification show diminishing or negative returns, reflecting an “ecological threshold” effect; (3) External shocks have a significant suppressive impact on startups, while policy support and capital size show limited explanatory power; (4) The ownership structure, especially state-holding, has a positive moderating effect on firm survival in specific contexts, indicating that private enterprises’ flexibility and adaptability can compensate for institutional gaps. This study offers insights into the spatial heterogeneity of firm survival mechanisms, providing quantitative evidence for regional economic policy adjustments and firm resilience-building. Recommendations include promoting differentiated policies, optimizing industrial ecological spatial layouts, and piloting systems to enhance survival resilience, especially for mixed-ownership firms.

Understanding the impact of local government debt on economic development has emerged as a focal issue for both academic research and policymakers. This study adopts a financing structure perspective and utilizes panel data from 214 cities and 3,228 A-share listed companies in China (2017–2023) to empirically investigate the impact of local government debt on corporate “shift from virtual to real economy” and its underlying mechanisms. The expansion of local government debt significantly promotes enterprises “shift from virtual to real economy”. The positive impact of local government debt on enterprises” transition from financialization to the real economy is more pronounced among firms in first tier and new first-tier cities, non-state-owned enterprises, and labor-intensive industries. Further analysis indicates that local government debt drives capital reallocation from financial investments to real investments by alleviating corporate financing constraints. This study proposes policy recommendations including optimizing debt fund allocation, further optimizing the financing environment, implementing differentiated regulatory measures. These suggestions provide both a theoretical foundation and practical references for synergistically advancing debt governance and real economy revitalization.

The endurance of empire in China over much of the past two millennia contrasts starkly with the political fragmentation in Europe since the fall of Rome. To explain the persistence of China’s empire, we analyze the role of keju, the imperial civil service examination system. We argue that the systematic implementation of keju from the Song dynasty onward tied local elites to the imperial state, sustaining political integration and reducing secessionist conflicts. Exploiting panel data covering 4,243 grid cells and 22 centuries, we find robust evidence that areas producing more jinshi – the top exam passers – experienced significantly fewer secessionist wars. Our study shows how the examination system created the political incentives for imperial durability.

The relationship between economic decentralization and regional economic growth has attracted wide academic attention. However, existing literature rarely explores the validity and applicability of decentralization theory from the perspective of location endowments. This study takes China’s county-to-city reform - a decentralization policy - as a point of entry to construct a decentralization model incorporating location endowments. Using county-level panel data from 1992 to 2009 and employing a difference-in-differences (DID) approach, the study evaluates the impact of county-to-city reform under the constraint of location endowments on county-level economic development. The findings reveal that the policy effects of local decentralization are constrained by location endowments. Specifically, in regions with poorer location endowments, county-to-city reform significantly inhibits local economic development. Indeed, mechanism analysis further indicates that in such disadvantaged regions, local decentralization under the county-to-city reform generates a “political resource curse” effect, which hinders economic growth through three channels such as distorted fiscal expenditure structures, corruption, and misallocation of land resources. The conclusions of this study provide a valuable perspective for understanding the conditions under which decentralization theory holds, while also offering rigorous empirical evidence for government agencies to design more targeted decentralization policies.

The Excellence Initiatives represent a significant investment in higher education, yet little is known about the causal impact of these programs on doctoral students and future researchers. Using a comprehensive student-level dataset, we apply a difference-in-differences approach to identify how China’s Double World-Class (DWC) Project affects PhD students’ research productivity. Our results indicate that the DWC Project significantly increases both the quantity and the quality of research output among PhD students in supported disciplines, even after controlling for supervisor-related effects. In addition, these impacts vary significantly across institutional tiers and academic fields. Lower-tier universities experience considerable increases in publication volume with slight enhancements in quality, while top-tier institutions show no notable variation in either aspect. Disciplinary patterns also vary: Science and medicine show improvement in both measures, while engineering displays little change overall. These findings demonstrate how excellence initiatives influence human capital development via doctoral training and provide evidence-based recommendations for education policymakers aiming to maximize returns on strategic higher education investments worldwide.

Capital market internationalization is widely regarded as an important pathway to improving resource allocation efficiency and enhancing governance quality, while simultaneously imposing higher requirements on corporate sustainability and social responsibility. However, its impact on firms’ internal income distribution remains subject to academic debate. This study treats the inclusion of China’s A-shares in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index as a landmark exogenous shock of capital market internationalization. Based on a sample of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2014 to 2022, we manually compile firm-level MSCI inclusion data and construct a multi-period difference-in-differences model for empirical testing. The results indicate that firms’ inclusion in the MSCI Index significantly increases their labor income share. The mechanism analysis reveals that this promoting effect operates mainly through three channels: alleviating financing constraints, fostering innovative development, and strengthening investor governance. Further heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect is more pronounced among technology-intensive firms, firms under greater competitive pressure, and firms with higher degrees of internationalization. By incorporating income distribution outcomes into the framework of capital market internationalization, this paper enriches the evidence on the economic and social effects of internationalization and provides policy implications for emerging economies to advance high-level capital market opening and optimize income distribution.

Traditional production function theory treats executive characteristics as exogenous fac-tors, failing to capture how managerial heterogeneity dynamically influences productiv-ity. This study integrates Upper Echelon Theory and Dynamic Capabilities Theory to develop an endogenous production function framework where executive attributes serve as dynamic parameters reshaping capital and labor elasticities. Using fixed effect-s panel-data models, we analyze Chinese listed companies, examining how executives’ education, experience, and compensation interact with production parameters. Re-sults show executive characteristics significantly moderate factor productivity: higher education and board independence enhance capital productivity, while compensation intensity transforms labor elasticity from negative to strongly positive values. Hetero-geneity analysis reveals effects vary across ownership types and technology intensity, with technology-intensive firms showing strongest responsiveness. This research recon-ceptualizes executives as active architects of production processes, provides a rigorous framework for endogenizing management factors, and offers evidence-based guidance for corporate governance and talent strategy optimization.