Yang Yang

Large-scale shopping festivals have become a central promotional format in online retail, yet their effects extend beyond short-term sales growth. Using two years of transaction-level data from a leading e-commerce platform in China, covering more than 577 million orders from approximately 60 million consumers in 331 cities and 4,369 active retailers distributed across 147 cities, we examine how shopping festivals shape consumer behavior and retail outcomes along multiple dimensions. We find that festivals generate substantial demand expansion, but also change how consumers time and evaluate purchases, leading to greater temporal concentration, increased work-hour shopping, and higher return rates. These effects are largely confined to festival windows, with little evidence of intertemporal substitution outside the event periods. Moreover, responses are highly heterogeneous across products and retailers: sales gains are concentrated in specific categories, whereas elevated return rates and their associated costs disproportionately affect small and medium-sized sellers, revealing a fundamental trade-off in event-driven promotions.

This study evaluates whether electric vehicles (EVs) in China have delivered on their “green” promise by improving air quality and reducing private ownership costs. Combining city–month data on EV adoption and air pollution with detailed vehicle-level transaction records, we find little evidence that rising EV adoption reduces concentrations of major pollutants or greenhouse gases. Both the traditional instrumental variable (IV) and the Bartik IV estimations show that the null effects persist after addressing potential endogeneity. The limited environmental gains are largely attributable to the continued dominance of coal in electricity generation and to a sizable rebound effect whereby lower operating costs increase vehicle usage. On the private side, although EVs reduce energy expenditures by roughly CNY 16,747, their faster depreciation leads to an average net loss of about CNY 18,175 over the ownership period relative to fuel vehicles (FVs). Counterfactual simulations show that EVs match the emissions of fuel vehicles when the coal share falls to about 55%, deliver measurable benefits below 49%, and require a reduction to around 31% once higher utilization is considered. The results show that the environmental benefits from EV adoption depend on a transition toward cleaner electricity generation.

The entry of High-Speed Railways (HSR) represents disruptive competition to airlines. Utilizing a unique dataset of all flights departing from Beijing to 113 domestic destinations in China since January 2009, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to examine the effects of HSR entry on on-time performance and to identify the channels. We document two main findings. First, the entry of HSR leads to significant reductions in the mean and variance of travel delays on the affected airline routes. Second, the reductions in departure delays and taxi-in times at the destination airports are identified as the main channels.

Using China's expansion of the high-speed rail system (HSR) as a quasi-natural experiment, we analyze the comprehensive vehicle registration data from 2010 to 2023 to estimate the causal impact of HSR connectivity on the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs). Implementing several identification strategies, including staggered difference-in-differences (DID), Callaway and Sant'Anna (CS) DID, and two instrumental-variable approaches, we consistently find that, by alleviating range anxiety, the expansion of HSR can account for up to one third of the increase in EV market share and EV sales in China during our sample period, with effects particularly pronounced in cities served by faster HSR lines. The results remain robust when controlling for local industrial policies, charging infrastructure growth, supply-side factors, and economic development. We also find that HSR connectivity amplifies the effectiveness of charging infrastructure and consumer purchase subsidies in promoting EV adoption.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

For thousands of years, the use of alcoholic beverages has been an intrinsic component of human culture. While existing research has documented the correlation between alcohol consumption and various health problems, the correlational evidence appears inconsistent and the causation has not yet been adequately demonstrated. This study provides new evidence on the causal impact of alcohol consumption on health by exploiting a plausible exogenous policy implemented in Finland in 1995, the deregulation of travelers' duty-free alcohol imports. After the deregulation, the surge in border crossings and alcohol imports resulted in a 12% increase in alcohol consumption nationwide. Based on the significant spatial heterogeneity in the impacts of the policy on alcohol consumption, domestic sales, and drunk driving cases, this study employs a difference-in-differences approach to compare medical expenditures on five major diseases in municipalities located close to border crossings than in those farther away. We find that the deregulation reduced the prevalence of diabetes by 0.11%, coronary heart disease by 1.01%, rheumatoid arthritis by 0.16% and hypertension by 0.138%, while the prevalence of epilepsy was not significantly affected. We also find the policy significantly reduces mental illness. As a consequence, the increase in alcohol consumption does not significantly affect different kinds of crimes. Our findings have significant implications for public policy debates on alcohol consumption and its potential impacts on health and society.

This study examines whether political connections lead state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) to behave differently from privately owned enterprises (POEs) in acquiring land parcels at auctions and explores the underlying mechanisms that drive the price premiums paid by SOEs. We find that SOEs pay 11.9% more than POEs for observably comparable land parcels at auctions, and the price premiums SOEs pay are mainly driven by wholly state‐owned enterprises (WSOEs). In particular, we provide evidence that SOEs have advance access to information about the development of land parcels in 134 state‐level special economic zones, and land parcels purchased by SOEs lead to positive stock market performance. We also show that an anti‐corruption campaign that weakens political connections and reduces the information advantage leads to a decrease in the price premiums paid by SOEs.