When comparing the credit ratings of domestic and global agencies on Chinese corporations, because of the differences in ratings scales, it is best to focus on the domestic and global agency orderings of relative credit risk. Testing for differences in the determinants of ratings, we find that asset size is weighed more heavily as a positive factor by domestic agencies, while profitability and state-ownership are weighed more positively by global rating agencies, which also weigh leverage more heavily as a negative factor. In spite of these differences, both domestic and global ratings appear to be priced into the market values of rated bonds.
The Chinese economy had spectacular growth in the past three decades, however the Chinese stock market had the worst performance among the major stock markets. Professor Franklin Allen from Imperial College, Professor Jun Qian from Fanhai International School of Finance, Fudan University, and coauthors offer their explanation of this puzzling divergence.
We provide the first regional breakdown of GDP per head for China from the Song dynasty to the Qing, so that regions of similar size can be compared between Europe and Asia to establish the timing of the Great Divergence of living standards.
We study the impact of recent tariffs on US prices at the border and at the store. Our results imply that, so far, the tariffs’ incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.
To encourage innovation, the Chinese government gave tax incentives to firms whose R&D intensity (as measured by the ratio of R&D expenditures over total sales) exceeds a threshold that varies by their total sales. Using a major corporate tax reform in 2008, Professor Daniel Yi Xu from Duke University and his coauthors provide empirical evidence for some "strategic" behavior — including some relabeling of administrative expenditures as R&D — by the firms to take advantage of the tax incentives.