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In the Shadows of the Government: Relationship-building during Political Turnovers
Hanming Fang, Zhe Li, Nianhang Xu, Hongjun Yan, Mar 06, 2019We document that firms use two instruments to build relationships with local government officials in China: “perk spending” and personnel changes. Following a turnover in the positions of Party Secretary or Mayor of a city in China, firms (especially private firms) headquartered in that city significantly increase their perk spending...
Currency Carry Trade by Trucks: The Curious Case of China’s Massive Imports from Itself
Xuepeng Liu, Heiwai Tang, Zhi Wang, Shang-Jin Wei, Apr 13, 2022Capital controls are common in many developing countries. With capital controls, the standard financial market transactions needed for currency carry trade are hard to implement. Yet, as long as there is a big difference between domestic and foreign interest rates, the incentive to engage in currency carry trade is present.
GDP Management to Meet or Beat Growth Targets
Changjiang Lyu, Kemin Wang, Frank Zhang, Xin Zhang, Oct 24, 2018We apply the discontinuity methodology from the accounting literature to a political economy setting of GDP reporting and examine whether Chinese local governments manage regional GDP numbers. We find strong evidence of discontinuities around zero in the distribution of actual minus target GDP growth rates. The frequencies of just meeting or beating GDP growth targets are about five (four) times the frequencies of just missing targets at the prefecture (province) level. The results are stronger for governors with longer tenures and those without political connections to higher-level officials as well as for local governments with more resources under their control.
The Unintended Impacts of Agricultural Fires: Human Capital in China
Joshua Graff Zivin, Tong Liu, Yingquan Song, Qu Tang, Peng Zhang, Dec 25, 2019The practice of burning agricultural waste is ubiquitous around the world, yet the external human capital costs from those fires have been underexplored. Using data from the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) and agricultural fires detected by high-resolution satellites in China from 2005 to 2011, this paper investigates the impacts of fires on cognitive performance...
Verifying China’s COVID-19 Recovery Using the FRBSF China CAT
Remy Beauregard, John G. Fernald, Mark M. Spiegel, Dec 23, 2020Using the FRBSF China Cyclical Activity Tracker, we confirm the robustness of China’s recovery from the COVID-19 downturn. The FRBSF “China CAT” estimates that first quarter 2020 China GDP plunged 6.4 standard deviations below its detrended level a year earlier, but by the end of the third quarter, China economic activity had recovered to only 0.1 standard deviations below trend. As such, the FRBSF China CAT index validates the accuracy...
