We study the urbanization process in China during the past decade by deconstructing different sources of new urban residents. We find that around one-third of urban population growth in the past decade has consisted of redefined migrants from communities that have been reclassified from rural to urban, though they do not actually move. We further find evidence that failing to consider the number of redefined migrants and their housing behaviors leads to a high housing vacancy rate in China’s urban areas.
By exploiting the exogenous variation in air pollution caused by China’s central heating policy, we find that air pollution reduces the accumulation of executive talent and high-quality employees. We also find that firms located in polluted areas have poorer performance, especially for firms with greater dependence on human capital.
This paper documents a novel trade-off of banking deregulation in the context of China by using loan-level big data. We find that following a deregulation in the form of geographically lowered bank entry barriers, the potential benefits such as the lower interest rates for borrowers were mitigated adversely by the worsening credit allocation. The soft budget constraint...
Focusing on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, we show that Chinese cities with more exposure to trade liberalization sent more students to US universities.
We examine whether firms over-report international trade to evade capital controls for foreign exchange arbitrage, by specifically testing whether the aggregate bilateral trade data gap between trading partners is positively (negatively) correlated with the exchange rate spread when the spread is positive (negative). At the disaggregated level, we also employ Benford’s law to detect trade data manipulations...