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Industrial Land Discount in China: A Public Finance Perspective

Zhiguo He, Scott Nelson, Yang Su, Anthony Lee Zhang, Fudong Zhang, Jul 25, 2022

Local governments, which serve as monopolistic land sellers in China, face a trade-off when deciding to supply residential land versus industrial land. This trade-off is determined by the different time profiles of revenues from industrial and residential land sales, local governments’ financial constraints, and the extent of local governments’ tax revenue sharing with other levels of government.

No Winners but Only Losers in the China-US Trade War

Marlene Amstad, Leonardo Gambacorta, Chao He, Dora Xia, Mar 31, 2021

Trade tensions between China and the United States have played an important role in swinging global stock markets, but the effects are difficult to quantify. Using a comprehensive database constructed by Wisers, we develop a novel trade sentiment index (TSI) based on textual analysis that assesses the positive or negative tone of Chinese media coverage of the China-US trade situation and evaluates the TSI’s capacity to...

Estimating China’s Growth Potential from Its Global Value Chain Position

Dazhong Cheng, Jian Wang, Zhiguo Xiao, Mar 04, 2020

We find that China’s potential growth in GDP per capita is substantially underestimated if the level of GDP per capita is employed as the convergence indicator as done in previous studies (e.g., Barro, 2015 and 2016). Using data on China’s position in the global value chain (GVC) prior to 2010, we predict that the country’s GDP per capita could have grown at 7%–8% annually between 2010 and 2015, which is closer...

Serial Entrepreneurship in China

Loren Brandt, Ruochen Dai, Gueorgui Kambourov, Kjetil Storesletten, Xiaobo Zhang, Jul 06, 2022

New firms have been an important engine of growth in the Chinese economy (Brandt, Van Biesebroeck, and Zhang 2012). Drawing on data on the universe of all firms in China, we study entrepreneurship and the creation of new firms in China through the lens of entrepreneurs who operate a series of firms over their lifetime, i.e., serial entrepreneurs (SE).

Can Information Influence the Social Insurance Participation of China’s Rural Migrants?

John Giles, Xin Meng, Sen Xue, Guochang Zhao, Apr 10, 2019

We use a randomized information intervention to shed light on whether poor understanding of social insurance—in terms of both the enrollment process and the associated costs and benefits—drives the relatively low rates of participation in urban health insurance and pension programs among China's rural-urban migrants. Among workers without a contract...