Collateral menus and corporate employment: Evidence from China's Property Law

We investigate whether introducing the collateral menus of liquid assets (e.g., inventory and accounts receivable) influences corporate hiring decisions. Our identification scheme treats the enactment of China's Property Law in 2007 as a quasi-natural experiment and then conducts a difference-in-differences estimation. The results show that firms with less net fixed assets hire more workers, particularly for firms with tighter financial constraints, higher labor intensity and those located in cities with stricter law enforcement, greater fiscal pressure and lower bank density. Further analysis shows that liquid assets help firms obtain more debt, save less cash, decrease the cash flow sensitivity of cash and investment and invest more in fixed assets, consistent with the collateral channel. In addition, a significant convergence of labor productivity across firms illustrates that the Property Law also has a labor reallocation effect. Our findings shed light on the importance of expanding collateral menus in maintaining employment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Population Bottlenecks and Intra-host Evolution during Human-to-Human Transmission of SARS-CoV-2Population Bottlenecks and Intra-host Evolution during Human-to-Human Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 (preprint)

The emergence of the novel human coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, causes a global COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic. Here, we have characterized and compared viral populations of SARS-CoV-2 among COVID-19 patients within and across households. Our work showed an active viral replication activity in the human respiratory tract and the co-existence of genetically distinct viruses within the same host. The inter-host comparison among viral populations further revealed a narrow transmission bottleneck between patients from the same households, suggesting a dominated role of stochastic dynamics in both inter-host and intra-host evolutions. Author summaryIn this study, we compared SARS-CoV-2 populations of 13 Chinese COVID-19 patients. Those viral populations contained a considerable proportion of viral sub-genomic messenger RNAs (sgmRNA), reflecting an active viral replication activity in the respiratory tract tissues. The comparison of 66 identified intra-host variants further showed a low viral genetic distance between intra-household patients and a narrow transmission bottleneck size. Despite the co-existence of genetically distinct viruses within the same host, most intra-host minor variants were not shared between transmission pairs, suggesting a dominated role of stochastic dynamics in both inter-host and intra-host evolutions. Furthermore, the narrow bottleneck and active viral activity in the respiratory tract show that the passage of a small number of virions can cause infection. Our data have therefore delivered a key genomic resource for the SARS-CoV-2 transmission research and enhanced our understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of SARS-CoV-2.