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This paper aims to investigate how differently the COVID-19 blockade regulations influence the prices of perishable and storable foods. The authors focus on the cases of the 2020 blockade at Hubei province and the 2021 blockade at Shijiazhuang city in China, and the authors examine how the blockade influenced the prices of Chinese cabbages (perishable) and potatoes (storable) within and around the blockade area.

The paper employs the fixed effects model, the panel VAR (PVAR) model, and the spatial dynamic panel (SPD) model to estimate the impacts of the blockade on the food prices. It constructs the unique data set of 3-day average prices of Chinese cabbages and potatoes at main wholesale markets in China during the two urban blockade periods from January 1 to April 8 in 2020 and from January 1 to March 1 in 2021.

The results from the SPD models indicate that the price of Chinese cabbages was more vulnerable and increased by 7.1–9.8% due to the two blockades while the price of potatoes increased by 1.2–6.1%. The blockades also significantly influenced the prices in the areas adjacent to the blockade area. The SPD results demonstrate that the impacts of the blockades would be overestimated if the spatial dependence is not controlled for in the fixed effects model and the PVAR model.

Because the research focuses on the cases in China, the results may lack generalizability. Further research for other countries is encouraged.

This paper demonstrates the importance of considering food types and spatial dependence in examining the impact of the COVID-19 blockades on food prices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of off-farm labor employments on household land rental behavior in rural China.

IV-Probit and IV-Tobit model are used to identify the estimate of interest.

The results indicate that households with more members participating in either migration or local off-farm work are more/less likely to rent out/in land. Moreover, the effect of migration on household land rental behavior is much larger than the effect of local off-farm work.

These results suggest that ensuring benefits of migrants in urban cities can automatically promote household land rental behavior in rural China.

The authors provide a rigorous and careful empirical analysis on the effect of off-farm employment on household land rental behavior and pay special attention to the endogeneity issue tackled using separable instruments.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the relative impacts of full-scale land reallocation (FLR) and partial-scale land reallocation (PLR) on household land rental behavior in rural China.

Probit model, Tobit model and Semi-parametric model are used to provide empirical evidences.

Drawing upon an unique farm survey in 2003, the authors find that in rural China, FLR is more likely to follow egalitarian rule and PLR takes productivity of households into consideration. Econometric analysis provides two main findings. First, FLR has positive effect on household land rental behavior, possibly because egalitarian FLR creates a mismatch between household agricultural ability and land size and after FLR households have to participate in land rental market to adjust the mismatch. Second, PLR has negative effect on household land rental behavior which supports that land reallocation and land rental market are substitutes (Brandt et al., 2004).

The main contribution of this study is to show that FLR and PLR in rural China are motivated by two different rationales (i.e. FLR by egalitarian concerns and PLR by efficiency concerns).