China has become a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), a data-intensive technology with the potential to transform the global economy. We argue that the Chinese state’s collection of data and provision of data to commercial firms contribute to China’s AI leadership. We provide supportive evidence from China’s facial recognition AI sector and develop a macroeconomic model that illustrates how the Chinese state's surveillance interest aligns with promoting AI innovation, but potentially at the expense of privacy.
Many developing countries adopt industrial policies favoring upstream sectors. Liu (2018) shows these policies might enhance aggregate production efficiency. When sectors form a production network, market imperfections generate distortions that compound through input demand linkages, accumulating into upstream sectors and creating an incentive for...
This paper argues that after a quarter century of sharp and sustained increase, Chinese inequality is now plateauing and even turning using various data sources and inequality perspectives. The evolution of inequality is further examined through decomposition by income sources and subgroups. Some preliminary explanations are provided for these trends in terms of shifts in policy and the structural transformation of the Chinese economy.
In China’s corporate bond market, the yield spread of newly issued bonds at their first secondary-market trade is on average 5.35 bps higher than the issuance spread. This overpricing is robust across bond issuances with different credit ratings, maturities, issuance types, and issuer status. Evidence suggests that competition among underwriters drives this overpricing through two specific channels—either through rebates to participants in issuance auctions or through direct auction bidding by the underwriters for themselves or their clients.
We examine the effect of computer-assisted learning on students’ long-term development. We explore the implementation of the largest ed-tech intervention in the world to date, which connected China’s best teachers to more than 100 million rural students through satellite internet. Exposure to the program improved students’ academic achievement, labor performance, and computer usage for at least ten years after program implementation. These findings indicate...