By exploiting the exogenous variation in air pollution caused by China’s central heating policy, we find that air pollution reduces the accumulation of executive talent and high-quality employees. We also find that firms located in polluted areas have poorer performance, especially for firms with greater dependence on human capital.
To examine the implicit guarantee provided by Chinese local governments to local government financing vehicles (LGFV), we create a proxy for local governments’ implicit debt ratio and find it correlated with the credit spread of LGFV bonds.
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.
We study the urbanization process in China during the past decade by deconstructing different sources of new urban residents. We find that around one-third of urban population growth in the past decade has consisted of redefined migrants from communities that have been reclassified from rural to urban, though they do not actually move. We further find evidence that failing to consider the number of redefined migrants and their housing behaviors leads to a high housing vacancy rate in China’s urban areas.
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.