Portfolio underdiversification is one of the most costly losses accumulated over a household’s life cycle. We provide new evidence on the impact of financial inclusion services on households’ portfolio choice and investment efficiency using 2015, 2017, and 2019 survey data for Chinese households. We hypothesize that higher financial inclusion penetration encourages households to participate in the financial market, leading to better portfolio diversification and investment efficiency. The results of the baseline model are consistent with our proposed hypothesis that higher accessibility to financial inclusion encourages households to invest in risky assets and increases investment efficiency. We further estimate a dynamic double machine learning model to quantitatively investigate the non-linear causal effects and track the dynamic change of those effects over time. We observe that the marginal effect increases over time, and those effects are more pronounced among low-asset, less-educated households and those located in non-rural areas, except for investment efficiency for high-asset households.

This paper uses the IV-2SLS model to explore the impact of analyst attention on firms' internal and external innovation paths from a dynamic perspective of the life cycle. When firms are in the growth stage, the higher the analyst attention, the more firms will significantly increase their internal R&D efforts and make active technology acquisitions; As firms enter maturity, analyst attention plays a role in promoting R&D investment and corporate venture capital activities; When enterprises are in the recession period, firms are more inclined to innovate independently under the influence of analyst attention. This bias is more significant in non-state enterprises and high-tech enterprises. Further study finds that the interaction between analyst attention and firms' innovation path under different life cycles effectively enhances innovation output.

This paper explores the relationship between longevity risk and health status transition under the framework of life cycle model to explore the optimal insurance allocation including annuity and nursing insurance under different incidence scenarios and the old-age security needs of residents Based on the data from China Health and Pension Tracking Survey (CHARLS), this paper calculates the health state transition probability of residents and calibrates the health state transition probability by using the mortality data of Lee-Carter model, and then solves the optimal insurance decision of residents under different incidence scenarios by multi-period life cycle model The results show that the demand for first annuity and nursing insurance is influenced by initial endowment, health status, minimum living and bequest motivation Residents with lower initial endowments are reluctant to buy annuities and nursing insurance because of precautionary savings motivation Expenditure on care insurance when purchasing both annuities and care insurance may weaken the demand for annuities Secondly, under the interaction of longevity risk and health status transition, residents have higher disability probability and higher demand for annuity and nursing insurance under the scenario of expanding incidence Thirdly, under the optimal wealth decision, the optimal allocation of annuity and nursing insurance makes the wealth level of residents more stable

We study the labor markets in China and the United States, the two largest economies in the world, by examining the evolution of their cross-sectional age-earnings profiles during the past thirty years. We find that, first, the peak age in the cross-sectional age earnings profiles, which we refer to as the “golden age,” stayed almost constant at around 45-50 in the U.S., but decreased sharply from 55 to around 35 in China; second, the age-specific earnings grew drastically in China, but stayed almost stagnant in the U.S.; third, the cross-sectional and life-cycle age-earnings profiles were remarkably similar in the U.S., but differed substantially in China. We propose and empirically implement a decomposition framework to infer from the repeated cross-sectional earnings data the experience effect (i.e., human capital accumulation over the life cycle), the cohort effect (i.e., inter-cohort human capital growth), and the time effect (i.e., changes in the human capital rental prices over time), under an identifying assumption that the growth of the experience effect stops at the end of one’s working career. The decomposition suggests that China has experienced a much larger inter-cohort productivity growth and higher increase in the rental price to human capital, but lower returns to experience, compared to the U.S. We also use the inferred components to revisit several important and classical applications in macroeconomics and labor economics, including growth accounting and the estimation of TFP growth, and the college wage premium and skill-biased technical change.

This paper studies how a potential policy change that raises women’s social security eligibility age from 50 to 60 would affect women’s employment, human capital, and earnings in China. I develop a dynamic model of female labor supply, featuring voluntary retirement; occupational choice; human capital accumulation contingent on occupation, age, and employment status; and child care using time inputs from parents, grandparents, and formal child care from the market. I estimate the model parameters by matching moments on employment, wages, and the time allocation of child care from micro data in China. The policy counterfactual raising women’s social security eligibility age yields two main findings. First, the policy change leads to only a moderate increase in aggregate labor supply because it affects the employment of old and young women in opposite directions. The reduction in social security insurance encourages women above the age of 50 to supply more labor. Yet low-skilled young women with children reduce their labor supply in response to the children’s grandmothers working more and providing less child care. Second, since human capital accumulation is faster on the earlier career path rather than later, the reduction in early career employment leads to persistent losses in human capital and earnings for low-skilled women.

This article examines the liquidity-investment relation of Chinese SMEs in comparison to large firms, and specifically focuses on the exogenous IPO event to observe how the responses of firm investment to cash flow change subsequent to the IPO. We find that the sensitivity of fixed investment to cash flow varies with firm size, and the over-reliance on internal funds by SMEs has reduced more prominently after the IPO than their larger counterparts, providing new evidence that liquidity constraints of investment are not constant in the same firm but shift along the life cycle. Our results strongly suggest that other financial resources to cover the cash flow shortfalls resulting from timing differences between the operating and investment cycles need to be considered in the examined relation and previous studies may have underestimated the impact of liquidity constraints on firm investment.