Most Popular

The Demand for Reverse Mortgages in China

Katja Hanewald, Hazel Bateman, Hanming Fang, Shang Wu, May 15, 2019

Reverse mortgages are financial products that allow older homeowners to live in their property and receive income for as long as they live; repayment is made from the proceeds of the property sales upon the homeowners’ death. A recent pilot program in China by Happy Life Insurance found almost no takeup of such products. We investigate whether, if reverse...

Rise of Bank Competition: Evidence from Banking Deregulation in China

Haoyu Gao, Hong Ru, Robert Townsend, Xiaoguang Yang, Aug 17, 2019

This paper documents a novel trade-off of banking deregulation in the context of China by using loan-level big data. We find that following a deregulation in the form of geographically lowered bank entry barriers, the potential benefits such as the lower interest rates for borrowers were mitigated adversely by the worsening credit allocation. The soft budget constraint...

Industry/Policy View Banking Across Borders: Are Chinese Banks Different?

Eugenio Cerutti, Cathérine Koch, Swapan-Kumar Pradhan, Feb 24, 2021

Chinese banks have become the largest cross-border lenders to emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs). Despite their different ownership structure, their type of global reach resembles that of advanced economies’ (AE) banks, with distance to their borrowing EMDEs less of a barrier than that of other EMDE banks and more like U.S. or European banks. While bilateral trade, FDI, and portfolio investment...

Overpricing in China’s Corporate Bond Market

Yi Ding, Wei Xiong, Jinfan Zhang, Nov 27, 2019

In China’s corporate bond market, the yield spread of newly issued bonds at their first secondary-market trade is on average 5.35 bps higher than the issuance spread. This overpricing is robust across bond issuances with different credit ratings, maturities, issuance types, and issuer status. Evidence suggests that competition among underwriters drives this overpricing through two specific channels—either through rebates to participants in issuance auctions or through direct auction bidding by the underwriters for themselves or their clients.

Do Interest Rates Play a Major Role in Monetary Policy Transmission in China?

Gunes Kamber, Madhusudan Mohanty, Aug 17, 2018

We explore the role of interest rates in monetary policy transmission in China in the context of its multiple instrument setting. In doing so, we construct a new series of monetary policy surprises using information from high frequency Chinese financial market data around major monetary policy announcements. We find that a contractionary monetary policy surprise increases interest rates and significantly reduces inflation and economic activity. Our findings provide further support to recent studies suggesting that monetary policy transmission in China has become increasingly similar to that in advanced economies.