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Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai’s Concession Era

Laura Alfaro, Cathy Ge Bao, Maggie X. Chen, Junjie Hong, Claudia Steinwender, Jul 09, 2025

Trademarks, which identify the source of goods and services, account for the majority of intellectual property filings worldwide. We investigate how firms adapt to the introduction of trademark institutions by exploring a historical precedent: China’s trademark law of 1923, an unanticipated and disapproved response to end foreign privileges in China.

E-Commerce Integration and Economic Development: Evidence from China

Victor Couture, Benjamin Faber, Yizhen Gu, Lizhi Liu, Apr 11, 2018

In our recent work (Couture et al., 2018), we combine an experiment that we implement across Chinese villages with a new collection of survey and administrative microdata to provide evidence on the potential of e-commerce integration to foster economic development in the countryside. We also explore the underlying channels and the distribution of the gains from e-commerce across households and villages.

Do Innovation Subsidies Make Chinese Firms More Innovative?

Hong Cheng, Hanbing Fan, Takeo Hoshi, Dezhuang Hu, Apr 24, 2019

The Chinese government has been using various subsidies to encourage innovations by Chinese firms. We examine the allocation and impacts of innovation subsidies, using the data from the China Employer Employee Survey (CEES). We find that the innovation subsidies are preferentially allocated to state-owned firms and politically connected firms...

How Does the Interaction between China’s Monetary and Regulatory Policies Impact Shadow Banking and Total Bank Credit?

Kaiji Chen, Jue Ren, Tao Zha, Jul 12, 2017

Following the four Trillion RMB fiscal stimulus in 2009, People's Bank of China tightened up its M2 supply. Kaiji Chen, Jue Ren and Zha Tao from Emory University and Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta explored how the banks reacted to the tightening of M2 supply by expanding shadow banking activities, and how the rapid growth of shadow banking in turn hampers the effectiveness of monetary policy.

The Mandarin Model of Growth

Wei Xiong, Feb 13, 2019

The Mandarin model is defined by two key features of the Chinese economy. First, the government takes a central role in driving the economy through its active investment in infrastructure. Second, the agency problems between the central and local governments can lead to a rich set of phenomena in the Chinese economy--not only rapid economic growth propelled by the tournament among local governors, but also short-termist behaviors of local governors that directly affect China’s economic and financial stability.