Replication data and code for: Traceability without De-Risking? Origin Reweighting after China's Timber-Legality Reform
Description
Timber-legality policy combines two distinct margins: traceability infrastructure and risk-sensitive procurement. We study how China's wood-import origins changed after its Forest Law made timber-ledger duties explicit. Bilateral HS6 trade for 31 major importers is combined with source-country forest-loss and governance scores fixed before 2020. A missing-aware matrix-completion design retains 76 HS44 products selected by a pre-reform rule. China's forest-and-governance exposure exceeded its 2021-2023 counterfactual by 0.188 standard deviations, ranking first under importer-specific baskets and second under a common China basket. Reweighting among continuing origins accounts for 89.9% of the raw increase. The component profile is more pronounced for governance than for tree-cover-loss exposure. Excluding Australia lowers the gap to 0.089, but the non-Australia gap remains positive and rises through 2023. The episode shows why legality regimes should evaluate origin composition, not only records, trade values, or partner counts; it does not isolate an Article 65 treatment effect.
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Institutions
- Peking UniversityBeijing, Beijing