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The Cost of China’s IPO Regulations on the Functional Efficiency of its Financial System

Charles M. C. Lee, Yuanyu Qu, Tao Shen, Nov 01, 2017

In sharp contrast with the market-and-disclosure based system in the US, IPOs in China are subject to strict regulatory rationing and control. We investigate the pricing implications of China’s IPO regulations for its publicly listed companies. We find that these regulations will give rise to significant market frictions with economic consequences for the prices, returns, and even investment decisions of China’s publicly listed companies.

China’s Rebalancing and Gender Inequality

Mariya Brussevich, Era Dabla-Norris, Bin Grace Li, Jun 23, 2021

This study documents women’s declining relative wages and labor force participation in China over the last two decades, in contrast with the predictions of the structural transformation literature, suggesting that rising service sector share is associated with narrowing gender gaps. We show that women’s labor supply elasticity to spouse’s wages increased dramatically between 1995 and 2013, which is consistent with a U-shaped relationship between economic development and women’s...

Does VAT Have Higher Tax Compliance Than a Turnover Tax? Evidence from China

Jianjun Li, Xuan Wang, Jan 15, 2020

We study the effects of compliance with the value-added tax (VAT) by exploiting the reform that replaced business tax (BT) with VAT in China beginning in 2012. We find that replacing the BT with VAT significantly increases the reported sales and costs for treated firms, and the impact is much stronger for business-to-business (B2B) transactions than for business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions. Buyers in B2B transactions...

Growing like China: Firm Performance and GVC Position

Davin Chor, Kalina Manova, Zhihong Yu, Apr 14, 2021

We use firm-level customs and manufacturing survey data, together with Input-Output tables for China, to examine how Chinese firms position themselves in global production lines. We document a sharp rise in the upstreamness of China’s imports, while the positioning of its exports has remained relatively stable, over the 1992-2014 period. Participation in global value chains thus appears to have facilitated an...

Physician-Induced Demand: Evidence from China’s Drug Price Zero-Markup Policy

Hanming Fang, Xiaoyan Lei, Julie Shi, Xuejie Yi, Aug 11, 2021

We exploit the staggered rollout of China’s drug price zero-markup policy (ZMP) to study physician-induced demand in healthcare. Our results show that the drug expenses in the treatment hospitals dropped by 63 log points (47 percent) compared with those of the control group; however, the expenses for non-drug services were 28 log points (32 percent) higher in the treatment group than in the control group. Our results provide robust evidence for physician-induced demand.