Factor Misallocation
Description
This dataset constitutes the replication package for the study “Does the Rural E-Commerce Demonstration Program Alleviate Agricultural Factor Misallocation? Evidence from 1,007 Counties in China”. The package contains a county-year panel for 1,007 Chinese counties from 2007 to 2021, along with the corresponding code scripts to reproduce all main empirical results. These include the baseline staggered Difference-in-Differences estimates, event-study diagnostics, robustness checks, mechanism analyses, heterogeneity analyses, and spatial spillover tests. Key variables provided are: (i) Treatment indicators for the Rural E-commerce Demonstration Program, including its staggered implementation timing. (ii) The primary outcome measure(s) for agricultural factor misallocation. (iii) A set of county-level control variables, including key macroeconomic and demographic covariates. (iv) Variables measuring the proposed mechanisms, namely entrepreneurship and industrial agglomeration.
Files
Steps to reproduce
To ensure the reliability of the empirical results, several data-processing steps are undertaken. Counties with substantial missing data are excluded from the sample. For a small number of variables with occasional missing observations, linear interpolation is applied. To mitigate the influence of extreme values on regression estimates, all continuous variables are winsorized at the 1% and 99% levels on an annual basis. After these procedures, the final sample consists of 1,007 counties across 21 provinces (including autonomous regions and municipalities). Data on macroeconomic variables primarily come from the National Bureau of Statistics, the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China, provincial and municipal statistical yearbooks, the China E-Commerce Yearbook, and the China Rural Statistical Yearbook. Temperature and precipitation data are obtained from the National Tibetan Plateau Data Center.