Scarcity nationalism during COVID-19: Identifying the impact on trade costs.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries used export and import policy as a tool to expand the availability of scarce critical medical products in the domestic market (scarcity nationalism). This paper assesses the direct and indirect (via trade in intermediates) increases in trade costs of critical medical goods resulting from these uncooperative policies. The results show that scarcity nationalism led to substantial increases in trade costs between February 2020 and December 2021 for most COVID-19 critical medical products, particularly garments (for example, face masks) and ventilators. The exception is vaccines, which saw a reduction in trade costs, which, however, was driven by the reduction in indirect trade costs for high-income countries, consistent with the view of a COVID-19 vaccine production club.

How COVID-19 travels in- and outside of value chains and then affects the stock market: Evidence from China.

The organisation of value chains within and between firms and even countries is an important reason for domestic as well as international travel. Hence, value chains create interdependencies which have to do with economic but also personal interactions between firms and places. The latter means value chains are a springboard for shocks-positive or negative-to travel and other related outcomes. This paper sheds light on how input-output relations in China as one human-interaction-intensive activity can help explain spreading patterns of COVID-19 in the first few months of 2020 in China. We document that COVID-19 at that time spread more intensively where input-output relations were stronger between cities in China, and this contributed to inducing direct and mediated, indirect effects on the stock market.

Dynamic network and own effects on abnormal returns: evidence from China's stock market.

This paper addresses the question of how to model the process of abnormal returns on individual stocks. It postulates a framework, where abnormal returns are generated by a process which features two autoregressive components, one stock-specific and one related to network effects. This process deviates from customary ones in that the parameters are specific to each stock/firm, that the autoregressive process is explicitly modelled instead of using cumulative abnormal returns over a pre-specified window, and that network effects are present. Abandoning either one of those deviations is rejected by data on Chinese stocks in 2018 and 2019, an episode which is significant for an abnormal stock-market returns analysis, as it was characterized by numerous tariff-setting events related to the "trade war" between the USA and China.

Is poverty the mother of crime? Evidence from homicide rates in China.

Income inequality is blamed for being the main driver of violent crime by the majority of the literature. However, earlier work on the topic largely neglects the role of poverty and income levels as opposed to income inequality. The current paper uses all court verdicts for homicide cases in China between 2014 and 2016, as well as various inequality measures calculated from 2005 mini census data together with a host of control variables to shed light on the relationship at the detailed Chinese prefecture-level. The results suggest that it is the poverty and low income level, rather than income inequality, that is positively related to homicide rates. We show that the internal rural-urban migration from more violent localities contributes to the destination cities' homicide rates. The poverty-homicide association implies that instead of "relative deprivation", "absolute deprivation" is mainly responsible for violent crime. Poverty is the mother of crime. -Marcus Aurelius (121-180AD), Emperor of the Roman Empire.

Endogenous risk-taking and physical appearance of sex workers.

Previous research found that physical appearance affects the risk-taking of sex workers through offering unprotected services. This paper utilizes a large individual-level data set covering 16,583 pay-for-sex contracts in 2011 and 2012 by 2,517 female suppliers in Germany. Results based on instrumental variables suggest that the incentive for risk-taking is about twice as high than when assuming random assignment of risk-taking.