This study investigates the factors contributing to building damage during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
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.
The introduction of the English listening test in the NCEE has exacerbated educational inequality between urban and rural areas in China, thereby affecting the college admission prospects and future income of rural students.
Industrial policy is often discussed through high-level narratives and flagship initiatives, yet its implementation—particularly at the subnational level—remains opaque. We leverage large language models (LLMs) to systematically analyze over three million government documents from 2000 to 2022, extracting structured policy information to decode China’s industrial policy at various levels of government. Combining these newly constructed granular industrial policy data with micro-level firm data, we document four sets of facts on China’s industrial policies, including the economic and political rationality of the choice of the target sectors, the dynamics of the policy tools, the diffusion and similarity of policies, and the effects on firm entry and productivity.
Corporate credit growth in China has been excessive. The debt problem should be addressed urgently with a comprehensive strategy, trading short-term economic pain for larger longer-term gain.