The COVID-19 pandemic had an unequal impact on the employment and earnings of different labourers, consequently affecting households’ per capita income and income inequality. Combining a multisector computable general equilibrium model of China with a micro-simulation approach, this study aims to analyse the unequal effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on China’s labour market and income inequality. The results confirm the unequal impact of the pandemic on the employment and earnings of different labourer types. Labourers who are female, live in urban areas, and have relatively low education levels would suffer greater losses in employment and earnings. The pandemic would reduce household per capita income by 8.75% for rural residents and 6.13% for urban residents. While the pandemic would have a larger negative impact on the employment and earnings of urban labourers, it would have a greater negative impact on the household per capita income of rural residents. Moreover, the per capita income of low-income households is more vulnerable to the pandemic, and the number of residents living below the poverty line would increase significantly. Thus, the pandemic would aggravate income inequality in China and threaten the livelihoods of poor families. This study could inform researchers exploring the distributional effect of the COVID-19 pandemic in developing countries.

The increasing amount of waste produced has been a challenge for human health and the environment, causing a call for effective waste management measures in which household waste separation is of great significance. Although an expanding body of literature has examined the impact of social capital on individual waste-separation behavior, few studies have explicitly discussed the endogeneity problem and the influence mechanisms. Accordingly, our study investigates the effect of social capital on waste-separation behavior and corresponding mechanisms using a national survey dataset of China. The study also reveals the heterogeneity of the influence of individual characteristics on waste-separation behavior. Our results demonstrate that social capital casts a significant positive impact on waste-separation behavior, providing opportunities for individuals’ social learning and strengthening the reputation effect. The heterogeneous effects of social capital reveal that women, higher-educated individuals, and political party members present better waste-separation behavior. Besides, the impact of social capital varies between urban and rural areas and among different age groups. Our study provides empirical evidence for policy making of household waste-separation management in developing countries from the perspective of informal institutions.

Albeit notably increasing studies dedicated to investigating the impact of air pollution on enterprises’ productivity and profit, few have oriented onto explicitly probing how the enterprises, particularly those foreign-invested firms, made their location choices concerning air quality. Accordingly, this study contributes to explain the impact of air pollution on the site selection of foreign-invested manufacturing enterprises with a unique firm-level dataset of China. The study also discloses the heterogeneity of air pollution effects attributable to enterprises’ various features regarding ownership property, host country, industrial classification, and investment scale. Our result justifies a statistically significant and negative impact of air pollution on the siting of foreign-invested manufacturing enterprises. The heterogeneous effects of air pollution manifest that the location choice would be remarkably more sensitive for the sole-venture enterprises, and for those headquartered in developed countries, engaged in high-technology industries, and at small and medium investment scales. The study finds that the siting of small-scale firms in high-technology sectors appears to be the most sensitive to air pollution, signifying that air pollution severity would be a pivotal factor pushing aside high-quality foreign-invested enterprises to invest in polluted areas in general.