Most Popular

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...

China’s Import Demand for Agricultural Products: The Impact of the Phase One Trade Agreement

Robert Feenstra, Chang Hong, Aug 19, 2020

This paper shows that the most efficient way for China to fulfill its committed import purchases from the United States under the Phase One trade agreement is to mimic the effect of an import subsidy. The effective subsidies would divert China’s agricultural imports from other countries. We find that this trade diversion is especially strong for Australia and Canada, followed by Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Taking Stock of Trade Policy Uncertainty: Evidence from China’s Pre-WTO Accession

George Alessandria, Shafaat Khan, Armen Khederlarian, Dec 04, 2019

We propose a method to estimate the perceived likelihood of an uncertain increase in tariffs using the rise in trade flows in advance of the uncertainty resolution. We apply this framework to the uncertainty surrounding the U.S.’s annual renewal of China’s most-favored-nation (MFN) status in the 1990s. By matching the observed rise in imports in advance of U.S. Congress votes on the renewal, we find that the probability...

In-Consumption Social Listening with Moment-to-Moment Unstructured Data

Qiang Zhang, Wenbo Wang, Yuxin Chen, Jan 03, 2019

Major video and live streaming platforms in China have recently introduced a live commenting feature that allows viewers to post comments in real time during video content consumption. Building on the rich live comment data, this research proposes a novel approach for in-consumption social listening to extract live consumption experience. The approach is demonstrated in the context of online movie watching...

Does China’s Place-Based Land Policy Lead to Spatial Misallocation?

Min Fang, Libin Han, Zibin Huang, Ming Lu, Li Zhang, Nov 17, 2021

After 2003, the Chinese central government implemented an inland-favoring land supply policy that distributed more construction land quotas to underdeveloped non-eastern regions. We investigate the effect of the policy and find that it drastically increased land and housing prices in more-developed eastern regions, which consequently created substantial spatial misallocation of land and labor. The policy seems to reduce regional output gaps; however, it hurt...