Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) on the private transfer behavior of the non-co-resident adult children to their elderly parents in rural China, and hence address the income redistribution effectiveness of public program for the elderly in rural China. Design/methodology/approach: Pooled data from two waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study and the combination of regression discontinuity design and difference in difference method are used to perform the analysis. Findings: No evidence is found that pension payment from NRPS program does significantly crowd out the economic support from the adult children to their elder parents. The heterogeneous effects at different income percentile indicate that pension payment significantly increases the probability of receiving gross transfers and likelihood of the net transfer being positive for those elderly individuals with low income; in particular, the distinctive “family binding” arrangement may dramatically contribute to increasing the probability of receiving private transfers for the pension recipients. Originality/value: The empirical findings would have far-reaching implications for the efficacy of public transfer or re-distributive programs such as NRPS; for the rural elderly, in particular, the unique “family binding” mechanism under the NRPS program may have positive welfare effects on the intended beneficiaries. Furthermore, an understanding of the inter-linkage between informal arrangements of elderly support and social re-distributive program provides further insight into the design of social security systems targeted to the vulnerable group in developing countries.

Understanding the antecedents and consequences of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) is of significant theoretical value and great interest to both consumers and firms. To reconcile the disagreement in the relationship between eWOM and product sales, we investigate the joint effect of different dimensions of eWOM on the sales of durable goods (i.e., cars). Our study is based on eWOM collected from Autohome, a leading online review platform of automobiles in China. Our empirical results show that the volume and valence of eWOM positively affect car sales, and variance negatively affects car sales when the volume of eWOM is low. Further analyses of the joint effect show that the positive impact of eWOM volume on sales is stronger when the valence is lower and the variance is higher. This research contributes to the literature on eWOM and provides helpful suggestions for firms by shedding light on the joint effect of different dimensions of eWOM in the context of the Chinese automobile industry.

Online consumer reviews provide an important source of information for automobile purchase decisions, yet relatively little is known about the informational value of cumulative electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) ratings that reflect long-term online reputation. This study examines whether cumulative eWOM ratings are associated with subsequent automobile sales and explores their relationship with subsequent changes in monthly ratings and rating entropy. We combine monthly automobile sales data from Chezhu Zhijia with more than one million individual consumer reviews collected from Autohome between January 2013 and December 2025. Review-level data are aggregated to the automobile model-month level to construct cumulative eWOM measures, and the hypotheses are examined using two-way fixed-effects models. The results show that cumulative eWOM ratings are positively associated with subsequent automobile sales. Higher cumulative ratings are also associated with more favorable changes in subsequent monthly ratings and lower rating entropy. The positive association between cumulative eWOM ratings and automobile sales becomes stronger as product age increases and varies with cumulative rating entropy. These findings remain qualitatively unchanged across a broad set of robustness and additional analyses. This study highlights the informational value of cumulative online reputation for high-involvement durable goods and provides new evidence on the conditions under which accumulated consumer evaluations are associated with market outcomes.