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Expanding Access or Reshaping Markets? Evidence from Public–Private Partnership Health Insurance in China Hui Ding, Xintong Wang, Xian Xu, May 26, 2026 City-customized supplemental medical insurance (CCSMI) is a major insurance expansion initiative in China through public-private partnership. Although it expanded coverage for hundreds of millions of people, it also crowded out private insurance purchases at both the extensive and intensive margins. This suggests that enrollment growth alone overstates the true gains in risk protection, and calls for better PPP design and stronger coordination with existing insurance programs.
Subsidising the Supply Chain: How China’s Industrial Policy Shapes Export Competitiveness Wenyin Cheng, David Liang, Bo Meng, Hongyong Zhang, May 20, 2026 As governments expand industrial subsidies in the name of economic security, debate intensifies over whether such policies distort trade or enhance competitiveness. This column presents new evidence from China showing that subsidies do more than support individual firms – they ripple through domestic supply chains, boosting downstream exports and product quality. Industrial policy, it turns out, travels along value chains.
Fintech Lending and Cashless Payments Pulak Ghosh, Boris Vallée, Yao Zeng, May 13, 2026 Banks have long dominated lending thanks to their informational advantages over borrowers, but fintech lenders are leveling the playing field by exploiting an unexpected data source: cashless payments.
The Geography of Market Power: Rethinking Consolidation in China’s Steel Industry Loren Brandt, Feitao Jiang, Yao Luo, Yingjun Su, May 06, 2026 China’s steel industry is the world’s largest, but it is also famously fragmented. For years, policymakers have pushed for mergers and acquisitions to consolidate the sector, aiming to boost efficiency and create a handful of national champions.
Sex and the City: Demographics, Spatial Sorting, and the Marriage Market Min Fang, Zibin Huang, Yushi Wang, Yu Alan Yang, Apr 28, 2026 China's falling marriage rate reflects a fundamental spatial mismatch: as highly educated women sort into big cities with larger service sectors and less educated men concentrate in poorer regions, persistent hypergamous norms leave both groups without suitable local partners.
Contract Design and Insurance Take-up Jing Cai, Apr 22, 2026 Offering farmers a menu of insurance contracts instead of a single option significantly increases insurance take-up, by changing how farmers evaluate options within the contract menu.
Pollution in the Rain: Strategic Evasion of Water Pollution Regulations in China Runhao Zhao, Ye Yuan, Apr 15, 2026 Rain dilutes and cleanses surface water—but not always. We document a novel “polluting-in-the-rain” phenomenon: industrial firms strategically time the release of untreated wastewater into waterways during heavy rainfall, exploiting the natural dilution effect to evade water quality regulations that are primarily designed for dry-weather conditions. Such strategic emissions pose a serious threat to local water quality and significantly undermine China’s national pollution abatement efforts.
How Credible Is Hong Kong’s Currency Peg Urban Jermann, Bin Wei, Vivian Yue, Apr 08, 2026 Using daily spot exchange rates and derivatives prices, we estimate a peg-survival probability p and an implied fundamental value of V for HKD under an alternative regime...
Can Foreign Direct Investment Boost Social Mobility? Evidence from China Jianpeng Deng, Zibin Huang, Qing Shi, Xin Zhao, Apr 01, 2026 Using China’s foreign direct investment (FDI) liberalization following WTO accession as a quasi-natural experiment, we examine whether foreign direct investment can promote intergenerational occupational mobility.
Ray of Hope? The Rise of Solar Energy in China Ignacio Banares-Sanchez, Robin Burgess, Dávid László, Pol Simpson, John Van Reenen, Yifan Wang, Mar 25, 2026 China’s solar subsidies triggered innovation and learning-by-doing that dramatically lowered global solar costs while generating domestic economic gains large enough to outweigh the subsidy costs, showing that green industrial policy can simultaneously boost growth and help fight climate change.
Recent
Human-Capital Externalities in China Edward L. Glaeser, Ming Lu, Oct 10, 2024 This paper provides evidence of heterogeneous human-capital externality using CHIP 2002, 2007, and 2013 data from urban China. After instrumenting city-level education using the number of relocated university departments across cities in the 1950s, one additional year of city-level education increases individual hourly wages by 22.0 percent, more than twice the OLS estimate. Human-capital externality is greater for all groups of urban residents in the instrumental variables estimation.
How Liberalizing Trade with China Led to a Boom in International Students in the US Gaurav Khanna, Kevin Shih, Ariel Weinberger, Mingzhi Xu, Miaojie Yu, Aug 16, 2023 Focusing on China’s accession to the World Trade Organization, we show that Chinese cities with more exposure to trade liberalization sent more students to US universities.
Regional Variation of GDP per Head within China, 1080–1850: Implications for the Great Divergence Debate Stephen Broadberry, Hanhui Guan, Sep 28, 2022 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.
Combating Cross-Border Externalities Shiyi Chen, Joshua Graff-Zivin, Huanhuan Wang, Jiaxin Xiong, Sep 21, 2022 China implemented a pioneering policy in 2011, the Ecological Compensation Initiative (ECI), which establishes side payments between upstream and downstream provinces in the Xin’an River Basin.
Assessing and Addressing the Coronavirus-Induced Economic Crisis: Evidence from 1.5 Billion Sales Invoice Zhuo Chen, Pengfei Li, Li Liao, Zhengwei Wang, Aug 31, 2022 We probe the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent containment policies on business activities in China by exploiting big data on 1.5 billion sales invoices. The average drop in sales was between 23% and 35%, depending on firm size, for the 12-week period after the Wuhan lockdown.
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.
Dollar Funding Stresses in China Laura Kodres, Leslie Sheng Shen, Darrell Duffie, Jul 13, 2022 The need for US dollar funding during the financial stresses of March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic shocked markets, was evident in a number of countries (Avdjiev, Eren, and McGuire 2020; Bahaj and Reis 2020).
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).
An Empirical Overview of Chinese Capital Market Grace Xing Hu, Jun Pan, Jiang Wang, Jun 29, 2022 We provide an empirical review of the Chinese capital market, focusing on the basic return and risk characteristics of its major asset classes, as well as a comparison to the US market. All major asset classes in China have significant higher volatilities than their counterparts in the US market, but they do not always yield larger returns. Small-company stocks, short-, medium-, and long-term treasury bonds outperform their US counterparts, while large stocks underperform and long-term enterprise bonds yield similar returns.
Mapping U.S.-China Technology Decoupling, Innovation, and Firm Performance Pengfei Han, Wei Jiang, Danqing Mei, Dec 01, 2021 We develop measures for technology decoupling and dependence between the U.S. and China based on combined patent data. The first two decades of the century witnessed a steady increase in technology integration (or less decoupling), but China’s dependence on the U.S. increased (decreased) during the first (second) decade. Decoupling in a technology field predicts China’s growing dependence on U.S. technology, which, in turn, predicts less decoupling further down the road...
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