Convergence forces suggest that China’s per capita GDP growth rate will decline gradually from around 7% per year to the world’s historical average of 2%. In the past, this convergence tendency was more than offset by China’s opening to markets, improved legal institutions and business regulations, increased investment rates, higher life expectancy, and reduced fertility—but the convergence force will ultimately dominate.
China implemented Basel III in 2013 and tightened bank capital regulations. Empirical evidence shows that the new regulations significantly reduced bank risk-taking following monetary policy easing. To meet the tightened capital requirements, banks respond to a balance-sheet expansion by raising the share of lending to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) that are perceived as low-risk borrowers under government...
We study credit allocation across firms and its real effects during China’s economic stimulus plan of 2009-2010 using loan-level data from the 19 largest Chinese banks matched with firm-level data on manufacturing firms. We find that the stimulus-driven credit expansion significantly affected firm borrowing, investment, and employment. The plan disproportionately favored state-owned firms and firms with a lower marginal product of capital, reversing the process of capital reallocation that characterized China’s high growth before 2008.
Chinese companies in the United States are generally adaptive to their host country’s legal and regulatory institutions. However, the adaptation varies in accordance with the companies’ ownership structure and the institutional distance between the two countries across different subject matter areas.
In our recent work (Gu et al., 2019), we combine a difference-in-differences approach with a novel road speed dataset from Baidu Maps to provide evidence on the effect of subways on road congestion. We explore heterogeneous effects with respect to road characteristics. Guided by a conceptual framework of transportation mode choices, we shed light on the welfare impact of subways, using Beijing as an example.