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Going Bankrupt in China

Bo Li, Jacopo Ponticelli, Aug 26, 2020

We use a new case-level dataset to document a set of stylized facts on bankruptcy in China and study how the introduction of specialized courts across Chinese cities affected insolvency resolution and the local economy. We find that specialized courts hire better-trained judges and are 35% faster at dealing with bankruptcy cases than civil courts within the same city. We also find evidence that their introduction benefited the local economy by fostering firm entry, increasing average capital productivity, and favoring the reallocation of employment out of "zombie" firm–intensive sectors.

Reluctant Entrepreneurs: Evidence from China’s SOE Reform

Hanming Fang, Ming Li, Zenan Wu, Yapei Zhang, Oct 09, 2023

In this column, we examine how the presence of state-owned enterprises (SOE) affects the private sector by influencing the allocation of skills across SOEs, private sector waged employment and entrepreneurship.

The Impact of Corporate Taxes on Firm Innovation: Evidence from the Corporate Tax Collection Reform in China

Jing Cai, Yuyu Chen, Xuan Wang, Dec 19, 2018

We explore a tax reform on manufacturing firms in China in order to study the impact of taxes on firm innovation. The reform switched corporate income tax collection from a local to state tax bureau and reduced the effective tax rate by 10 percent. The reform only applied to firms established after January 2002, allowing us to use a regression...

FDI and Firm Productivity in Host Countries: The Role of Financial Constraints

Wontae Han, Jian Wang, Xiao Wang, Mar 03, 2021

Using the Chinese firm-level data, we find that FDI firms may have even lower cutoff productivity than local firms, although FDI firms are still, on average, more productive than their local counterparts. In addition, these findings are more pronounced in financially more vulnerable sectors. We argue that easy access to international financial markets by FDI firms has played an important role in driving our empirical findings...

Judicial Independence, Local Protectionism, and Economic Integration in China

Ernest Liu, Yi Lu, Wenwei Peng, Shaoda Wang, Nov 23, 2022

Exploiting the staggered rollout, since 2014, of judicial independence reform that removed local governments’ control over local courts’ financial and personnel decisions in China, we show that judicial independence can reduce local protectionism and foster cross-regional economic integration.