Yixiao Zhou

Australian National University | ANU · Crawford School of Public Policy

The phenomenal economic growth in China has been accompanied by a rapid increase in income inequality. This paper reviews the historical trends and patterns of income inequality in China, discusses the potential causes underlying rising income inequality, and applies the functional distribution of income approach in understanding China’s income ine...

The tendency for human capital to accumulate and for institutional quality to improve as countries develop is well documented. This paper investigates the association of these changes with the evolution of industrial structure toward greater manufacturing sophistication. The empirical analysis is based on a newly constructed panel dataset for 15 in...

We examine differences in wage rates across countries for workers employed in the same industry, distinguishing workers in the low‐ medium‐ and high‐skill groups. These differences are large and show persistence over time. We ask, nonetheless, whether there is evidence of convergence, much as is done in studies of convergence in per‐capita income a...

This study adds to the understanding of China's innovation prospects by examining how variations in institutional quality within China impact on the R&D efforts of firms located in different provincial regions. In the process of identifying the effect of institutional quality, the roles of other factors such as ownership types and market structures...

Following three decades of rapid but unbalanced economic growth, China's reform agendas are set to rebalance the economy towards consumption while maintaining strong GDP growth. Headwinds include a demographic contraction that will bring negative labour force growth and rapid ageing. Rising aged dependency combined with lower saving rates will reba...

We examine the global distribution of company profitability over the 30 years from 1989 to 2018 focusing on the international dimension. We find the international component of profitability differences first declines and then rises. Regression analysis of time‐series data shows that transitory shocks to international profitability differences mostl...

Overseas engineering projects (OEPs) significantly facilitate China’s participation in global politics and economy. Based on Pew Global Surveys from 2005 to 2019, this study investigates the relationship between China’s OEP and the country’s national image. We find that OEPs have a positive impact in this regard, but most significantly in countries...

The Australian economy has benefited from several decades of extraordinary Chinese expansion. Slowing growth has diminished these gains and geopolitics between China and western democracies has seen restricted commerce between China and Australia. We use a global economic model to assess the consequences were these tensions to restrict all associat...

Corporate site visits (CSVs) are an important and popular channel for investors to interact with corporate insiders. Using Chinese stock market data, this study investigates the relationship between corporate site visits and firm performance. We find that a firm's performance, measured by ROE and Tobin's Q, is positively associated with the number...

Declines in low‐skill labour shares are reviewed and a stylised model is constructed to examine their determinants and future implications. A retrospective analysis of US shocks suggests that technological change has contributed more to raising income inequality and the wealth to GDP ratio than other changes. An anticipated future twist away from l...

While R&D spending is important for creating innovation in China, it is not necessarily sufficient for improving productivity and growth.

Since the implementation of the Labor Contract Law (LCL) in 2010, a significant increase in the capital/labor ratio, known as capital deepening, has occurred in private firms in China. However, the cause and impact of the capital deepening is still in question, as either technological change or a higher cost of labor might cause it. Using data from...

The purpose of this paper is to explore how sharecropping contracts are chosen over fixed-rent contracts. There are two concerning issues. First, theoretical explanation has been criticized for not providing a satisfactory answer to the question as to why share contracts are chosen. Second, among the existing empirical studies, there are great cont...

This study conducts the first analysis of the association between earnings management (EM) and corporate site visits. Results show that a corporate’s accrual-based EM is negatively associated with investors’ site visits, the number of external participants, especially institutional investors, and the depth and breadth of communication during a site...

This paper presents a multi-country version of the Ramsey growth model with cross-country technological interdependence. The results rationalize several stylized facts about growth and convergence. First, individual countries tend to converge toward country-specific balanced growth paths rather than steady-state equilibria. Second, an economy that...

Declining global multilateralism has brought numerous trade disputes, most notably between the US and China. Here, a new global model featuring monetary policy and revenue reassignment are used to examine the effects of this conflict and this macroeconomic perspective proves to be important. The emergent results provide additional insight and compl...

The COVID‐19 pandemic broke out at a time when there were heightened uncertainties in the global economy. Understanding these uncertainties provides an important background for analyzing the impact of the pandemic on the global economy, assessing the effectiveness of those policy measures in combating the pandemic and reviving the global economy, a...

Stylized representations of recent US and Chinese tax reforms, tariffs against imports and alternative Chinese monetary targeting are examined using a calibrated global macro model that embodies both trade and financial interdependencies. For both countries, unilateral capital tax relief and bilateral tariffs are shown to be “beggar thy neighbor” p...

We investigate characteristics of private in-house meetings by analyzing 7,369 records of Chinese-listed companies’ meetings. Using meeting content, we investigate four characteristics: number and heterogeneity of external participants, communication depth, communication breadth, and importance attributed to communication by executives. An increase...

This paper provides a theoretical model to explain the causality between China’s energy transition and capital deepening found by the empirical study. We prove that in the equilibrium, China’s energy transition is endogenously determined by capital deepening due to the homogeneity of electricity and the monopolistic competition features of China’s...

This paper investigates the inequality of opportunity in China's labor earnings, defined as the component of inequality determined by personal circumstances that lie beyond the control of an individual, of which gender is one, as opposed to the component determined by personal efforts. Using the Survey of Women's Social Status in China (2010), we m...

Using data from the 2012 China Enterprise Survey conducted by the World Bank, this study examines the determinants of intangible investment by private manufacturing firms and its impacts on firms' productivity in China, thus shedding light on the recent development of intangibles in one of the largest emerging economies in the world. Higher human c...

Chinese housing market is rapidly growing up. However, the study on housing market regulation is inadequate. In this paper, housing price indexes from 2006 to the present are analyzed based on the ARIMA model and intervention analysis, and the change of this index can reflect the effective date and valid date of country’s housing price regulation p...

In transitional economies, low wages imply sub-OECD yet growing labor shares of value added. China's rapid development has, however, seen a declining low-skill labor share and rising inequality. Here, a stylized model with three households and separable TFP and factor bias suggests a third of the decline in the low-skill share since 1994 is due to...

This paper investigates total-factor energy efficiency and analyses the trends of the efficiency changes in China’s agricultural production across 30 provinces and three regions from 2001 to 2011, based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach. The potential amount of energy savings and five potential factors for energy efficiency improvement ar...

Helen Cabalu and Yixiao Zhou, in “Evaluating indicators of energy security for sustainable development in Asia,” examine the fossil fuel energy profile of selected Asian countries in terms of specific energy supply indicators, which include intensity, net import dependency, ratio of domestic energy production to total domestic energy consumption an...

This study explores the efficiencies of firm’s R&D investment depending on the degree of reliance on government funding relative to firms’ private funding. Stochastic frontier analysis is applied on a sample of 30 provinces with data on R&D inputs and innovation outputs by all large- and medium-sized industrial firms in these provinces from 2000 to...

p>Existing country-level and firm-level studies have shed light on the mechanisms driving the globalization of R&D investment by multinational enterprises. However, there is a lack of industry-level evidence on this issue, which is much needed for the robustness of the theoretical and conceptual framework developed from country- and firm-level stud...

This thesis examines the channels and mechanisms of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading in the context of economic development. Technological progress is critical for a country's sustainable growth and for the successful transition of a country from imitation to innovation. Therefore, to clarify the main channels and mechanisms driving...