In a 2019 survey jointly administered by the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) and the PBC School of Finance at Tsinghua University (Tsinghua PBCSF), more than 90% of Chinese public firms report that they closely monitor the stock market for the purposes of learning information to guide real investment decisions and of accessing external financing. These findings provide direct evidence for the wide existence of market feedback via a learning channel and a financing channel, suggesting that the Chinese stock market is not just a side show, but instead, affects the real economy.
Positive network effects may lead to winner-takes-all in some markets. The column analyses dockless bike-sharing in China to show instead how an incumbent can benefit from positive spillovers from a competitor’s entry. In the case of bike-sharing, consumers multi-home, the market exhibits positive network effects, and investment by two firms is more cost-efficient than investment by one.
China’s remarkable economic rise over the past three decades has yielded many benefits to its own citizens and to people all around the globe. But the export-led growth model that underpinned China’s success and its increased role in the global economy has also led over time to the development of some serious imbalances in its economy. How China deals with these imbalances will have important implications for the rest of the world going forward—in particular, the quantitative analysis reported here suggests that were China to experience a financial crisis, the hit to the rest of the world would be substantial.
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...
This investigation uses a balanced panel of large manufacturing firms to provide novel evidence on the dynamic effects of computerizing VAT invoices on tax revenues and firm behavior in China, 1998-2007. We find that computerization increases cumulative VAT revenues and increases the effective average tax rate. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that the effects of computerization change over time: tax revenue gains are likely to be smaller in the long run. Meanwhile, firms reduce output and input, and increase productivity monotonically over time.