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.
The housing boom and bust cycle has called attention to the volatility of housing prices and its impact on other markets. We challenge the conventional wisdom that housing prices are the present value of future rents and show that housing price uncertainty can affect household property investments, which in turn affect rent. Using data from Hong Kong and mainland China, we find a significant effect of housing price on rent and draw important implications for monetary and macro-prudential policies.
This column evaluates the impact of the China tire safeguard on the US tire industry. Contrary to claims made by the US government, we find that total employment and average wages in the tire industry were unaffected by the safeguard. This result is not surprising as we find that Chinese tires have been completely diverted to other exporting countries due to the strong presence of multinational corporations in the world tire market. On the other hand, US domestic tire prices increased by up to 10% during the safeguard period...
Regime changes in China between AD 1000 and 2000 systematically altered the relative importance of different regions in the political hierarchy of that time. The evolution of Chinese provincial capitals and economic activities during this period throws light on how political factors shape economic geography. Employing a panel dataset...
As a quasi-natural experiment to estimate the causal impact of the collateral-based unconventional monetary policy, we exploit the expansion of the collateral for the Medium-Term Lending Facility (MLF) in the interbank bond market on June 1, 2018 by the People’s Bank of China. We also consider that many bonds are dual-listed in a largely segmented exchange market. We find that the policy reduced the spreads of the newly collateralizable, dual-listed bonds in the treatment...